Adobe’s New Photography App

credits: Project Indigo

Adobe has quietly launched Project Indigo, a new camera app built around computational photography, and it’s aiming at photographers who’ve never quite been sold on smartphone cameras. For many, phone photos just don’t feel like real camera photos. Even with all the advances in sensors and optics, people still find smartphone images too processed, too artificial, and lacking the manual control they’re used to. Project Indigo is Adobe’s answer to that.

One of the apps big tricks up is how it handles exposure. Instead of pushing a single frame to the limit in low light, Indigo captures and merges up to 32 frames in quick succession, resulting in photos that are cleaner, sharper, and less noisy, especially in shadows or dark scenes. It’s kind of like doing a long exposure, but handheld. You just tap the shutter, wait a couple of seconds, and let the app do its thing. The app also addresses zoom in a clever way. Instead of just cropping in and calling it a day, Indigo uses multi-frame super-resolution to rebuild detail, taking advantage of your natural hand movement to stack slightly different frames into a sharper image.

On top of that, Indigo gives you full pro-level control. You can dial in shutter speed, ISO, white balance, manual focus, and even tweak how many frames the app captures in a burst. It’s all designed specifically for computational photography. Project Indigo is free and already available for iPhone users with models starting from the 12 Pro and up, or 14 and newer for non-Pro phones. There’s no Adobe account needed, and more features (including Android support) are on the way.

You can real full details on Adobe’s blog here, and you can download the app here