The camera setup on iPhone 16 Pro is impressive. It does a far better job than Android phones with still photography as well as videos. But camera enthusiasts want more features in the default app. That is where Adobe’s new app — Project Indigo — comes in with granular controls, like white balance and shutter speed, besides AI-powered features like resolution upscaling for 10x zoom, denoising and reflection removal tools.
Project Indigo is meant for iPhones. It brings together the computational photography techniques from engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz.
“Instead of capturing a single photo, Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range,” reads the app’s description. The app tries to produce “SLR-like” look for photos.
The app comes with plenty of manual controls, “and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide”. It is achieved by under-exposing the shots it combines together and relying on a larger number of shots to combine — up to 32 frames. The app also offers features, like Remove Reflections, which utilises AI.
The iPhone’s optical zoom goes up to 5x, but Adobe’s app lets you digitally zoom in further while maintaining quality. Using AI and combining multiple frames, the shot retains more detail than simply zooming in 10x utlising the regular camera app.
Levoy left Google in 2020 and joined Adobe soon after. Kainz joined Adobe that same year. At Google, Kainz and Levoy were often credited with popularising the concept of computational photography.