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The Verge
27-06-2025
- The Verge
Adobe's new camera app is making me rethink phone photography
Adobe's Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds. It's the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo's basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera — just the thing for a camera nerd like me. If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you're tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It's available in beta on iOS, though it is not — and I stress this — for the faint of heart. It's slow, it's prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it's the most thoughtfully designed camera experience I've ever used on a phone, and it gave me a renewed sense of curiosity about the camera I use every day. This isn't your garden-variety camera app You'll know this isn't your garden-variety camera app right from the onboarding screens. One section details the difference between two histograms available to use with the live preview image (one is based on Indigo's own processing and one is based on Apple's image pipeline). Another line describes the way the app handles processing of subjects and skies as 'special (but gentle).' This is a camera nerd's love language. The app isn't very complicated. There are two capture modes: photo and night. It starts you off in auto, and you can toggle pro controls on with a tap. This mode gives you access to shutter speed, ISO, and, if you're in night mode, the ability to specify how many frames the app will capture and merge to create your final image. That rules. Indigo's philosophy has as much to do with image processing as it does with the shooting experience. A blog post accompanying the app's launch explains a lot of the thinking behind the 'look' Indigo is trying to achieve. The idea is to harness the benefits of multi-frame computational processing without the final photo looking over-processed. Capturing multiple frames and merging them into a single image is basically how all phone cameras work, allowing them to create images with less noise, better detail, and higher dynamic range than they'd otherwise capture with their tiny sensors. Phone cameras have been taking photos like this for almost a decade, but over the past couple of years, there's been a growing sense that processing has become heavy-handed and untethered from reality. High-contrast scenes appear flat and 'HDR-ish,' skies look more blue than they ever do in real life, and sharpening designed to optimize photos for small screens makes fine details look crunchy. Indigo aims for a more natural look, as well as ample flexibility for post-processing RAW files yourself. Like Apple's ProRAW format, Indigo's DNG files contain data from multiple, merged frames — a traditional RAW file contains data from just one frame. Indigo's approach differs from Apple's in a few ways; it biases toward darker exposures, allowing it to apply less noise reduction and smoothing. Indigo also offers computational RAW capture on some iPhones that don't support Apple's ProRAW, which is reserved for recent Pro iPhones. After wandering around taking photos with both the native iPhone camera app and Indigo, the difference in sharpening was one of the first things I noticed. Instead of seeking out and crunching up every crumb of detail it can find, Indigo's processing lets details fade gracefully into the background. I especially like how Indigo handles high-contrast scenes indoors. White balance is slightly warmer than the standard iPhone look, and Indigo lets shadows be shadows, where the iPhone prefers to brighten them up. It's a whole mood, and I love it. High-contrast scenes outdoors tend toward a brighter, flat exposure, but the RAW files offer a ton of latitude for bringing back contrast and pumping up the shadows. I don't usually bother shooting RAW on a smartphone, but Indigo has me rethinking that. Whether you're shooting RAW or JPEG, Indigo (and the iPhone camera, for that matter) produces HDR photos — not to be confused with a flat, HDR-ish image. I mean the real HDR image formats that iOS and Android now support, using a gain map to pop the highlights with a little extra brightness. Since Indigo isn't applying as much brightening to your photo, those highlights pop in a pleasant way that doesn't feel eye-searingly bright as it sometimes can using the standard camera app. This is a camera built for an era of HDR displays and I'm here for it. According to the blog post, Indigo captures and merges more frames for each image than the standard camera app. That's all pretty processor-intensive, and it doesn't take much use to trigger a warning in the app that your phone is overheating. Processing takes more time and is a real battery killer, so bring a battery pack on your shoots. It all makes me appreciate the job the native iPhone camera app has to do even more. It's the most popular camera in the world, and it has to be all things to all people all at once. It has to be fast and battery-efficient. It has to work just as well on this year's model, last year's model, and a phone from seven years ago. If it crashes at the wrong time and misses a once-in-a-lifetime moment, or underexposes your great-uncle Theodore's face in the family photo, the consequences are significant. There are only so many liberties Apple and other phone camera makers can take in the name of aesthetics. To that end, the iPhone 16 series includes revamped Photographic Styles, allowing you to basically fine-tune the tone map it applies to your images to tweak contrast, warmth, or brightness. It doesn't offer the flexibility of RAW shooting — and you can't use it alongside Apple's RAW format — but it's a good starting point if you think your iPhone photos look too flat. There are only so many liberties Apple and any other phone camera maker can take in the name of aesthetics Between Photographic Styles and ProRAW, you can get results from the native camera app that look very similar to Project Indigo's output. But you have to work for it; those options are intentionally out of reach in the main camera app and abstracted away. ProRAW files still look a little crunchier than Indigo's DNGs, even when I take them into Lightroom and turn sharpening all the way down. Both Indigo's DNGs and ProRAW files include a color profile to act as a starting point for edits; I usually preferred Indigo's warmer, slightly darker image treatment. It takes a little more futzing with the sliders to get a ProRAW image where I like it. Project Indigo invites you into the usually mysterious process of taking a photo with a phone camera. It's not an app for everyone, but if that description sounds intriguing, then you're my kind of camera nerd. Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
WIRED
21-06-2025
- WIRED
Gear News This Week: Adobe Wants to Make iPhone Photos Better, and TCL Brings Flexibility to Atmos
Plus: JLab's latest Bluetooth speakers start at $20, Wyze tries to make amends with new security upgrades, and more. Courtesy of Philips; JLab All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. The brains behind the computational photography that vaulted Google's Pixel phone camera to fame have a new camera app for you to try, this time from Adobe. Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz left Google several years ago, and Adobe's Project Indigo seems to be the fruit of their labor. The iPhone-only app is available on the App Store for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, plus iPhone 14 and newer. (It's free and doesn't require an Adobe account.) Like the computational photography techniques pioneered with the Pixel's camera, the Project Indigo camera app captures a burst of photos and combines them to deliver better dynamic range with low noise. The research paper written by Kainz and Levoy claims it produces a more natural 'SLR-like' look, closer to that of a professional camera than a smartphone. It does this by underexposing the image while combining up to 32 frames, much more than most phones. This supposedly creates a delay after pressing the shutter button, but that's the sacrifice to get better image quality. The app has manual controls, including shutter speed and ISO, and can capture photos in RAW and JPEG. Adobe's products are already the default for many creatives in post-production workflows, but if the company can craft a camera app that can produce better results than the native camera in smartphones, that could put one's entire workflow through Adobe's ecosystem. The app is still experimental, and the team is hoping to add more features, like Portrait mode, an Android app, and video recording. Wyze Tightens Security With VerifiedView We were big fans of Wyze's budget security camera wares, but those low, low prices came at a cost. We stopped testing and recommending Wyze cameras in early 2024 after a series of security incidents. (The final straw was the exposure of 13,000 camera feeds to customers who didn't own them.) The company has been working hard to beef up its security since then and win back customer trust. The latest announcement to that end is VerifiedView, which tags all your videos with your unique user ID. Before anyone can view, download, or share that content, Wyze verifies that the user ID on the content matches the account that's trying to access it. In short, it's a fail-safe to prevent anyone from being able to watch videos from other people's cameras, and it should make a recurrence of that last breach impossible. Over the last few months, Wyze has pulled in security consultants for extensive penetration testing, improved password requirements, enabled two-factor authentication by default, improved cloud security, beefed up encryption, and rolled out tools to detect suspicious logins. Wyze cofounder Dave Crosby told WIRED that Wyze has also reduced its reliance on third-party tools, which were partly to blame for that last breach. The company now has a bug bounty program and a transparent reporting policy, plus Crosby says every employee has completed cybersecurity training. It's a shame it took a serious breach for this to happen, but these actions are encouraging, and the company has managed to stay incident-free for almost 18 months now. We plan to resume testing Wyze devices soon. — Simon Hill Peak Design Finally Refreshes Its Travel Tripod I've been regularly using Peak Design's Travel Tripod for 5 years, so I'm excited to see the company finally debuting a successor: the Pro Tripod. It's now on Kickstarter with an expected October ship date. The Pro Tripod comes in various versions: Pro Lite ($800), Pro ($900), and Pro Tall ($1,000). They all can hold 40 pounds (as opposed to 20), are taller, and remain travel-friendly and portable. It was difficult to shoot video with the original Travel Tripod, but that's remedied with the Pro Tripod's fluid panning capability via the redesigned Pro Ball Head. There's a separate Tilt Mod you can add for full pan and tilt functionality. The differences between the new tripods aren't vast. The Pro Lite shaves some weight (it's 3.7 pounds) but doesn't get as stiff; the Pro Tall has a higher deploy height and can be stiffer, but is heavier and larger (4.5 pounds). The Pro blends a bit of both (4.2 pounds). The tripods have carbon fiber legs with a CNC-machined anodized aluminum center hub. They look like great upgrades all-around, only if you can stomach the leap in price. JLab's New Bluetooth Speakers Are Crazy Cheap JLab is taking its talents for crafting quality earbuds at shockingly low prices into the portable speaker market with four new budget Bluetooth models. The lineup starts with the $20 Pop Party Speaker, a hangable oval with dual two-inch drivers, dual passive radiators, customizable RGB lighting via the JLab app, and around eight hours of battery life. Stepping up to the $30 Go Party Speaker gets you slightly improved water resistance (IPX6 vs IPX5) and twice the battery life in a tubular design reminiscent of JBL's Flip speakers. The larger JBuds Party ($70) offers 30 watts of power to make it 'one of the most powerful speakers at its price,' according to JLab, though, unlike most speakers at this level, it's not fully dunkable, offering just IPX6 water resistance. Finally, because every brand needs a karaoke speaker, there's the $150 Epic Party with a 360-degree soundstage, four 2.5-inch drivers, a 5.25-inch woofer, and up to 16 hours of claimed battery life. Like its siblings, the Epic boasts RGB lighting and includes both a 3.5-mm aux connection and a quarter-inch jack for adding a microphone. All four speakers are available this week, and we'll be checking them out soon to see how they stack up to the best Bluetooth speakers we've tested. — Ryan Waniata TCL Z100 Speaker Makes Atmos Sound More Flexible More than 18 months after it was first teased at IFA 2023, TCL has confirmed the launch of the Z100—the world's first Dolby Atmos FlexConnect speaker. The aim here is to deliver Atmos sound wirelessly and flexibly, with a range of configurations available—from two to four speakers. As they are wireless, the Z100 speakers can be placed wherever is convenient in the room, and will work along with the sound from compatible TCL TVs as well as any other Z100s you own, creating a 5.1.2-channel or 7.1.4-channel Atmos sound. Each speaker packs four drivers, including one upwards firing, to deliver 170 watts of total power. The Z100 is currently compatible with the latest generation of TCL QD-Mini LED TVs, like the QM6K, and will also double up as a Bluetooth speaker (without Atmos). It'll be available first in France starting July 2025, with further European and US launches to follow. — Verity Burns Philips Hue Debuts the Wall Washer The latest smart lighting release from Philips Hue is the Hue Play Wall Washer. This sleek, black, aluminum device is just 6 inches tall and is designed to sit on your TV cabinet or sideboard and, as the name suggests, wash your wall in colorful light. Employing a new ColorCast projection technology, the Wall Washer sprays light at a wide angle and supports multiple simultaneous colors and a ton of lighting effects. You can sync it with your existing Hue lights and systems, including the Hue HDMI Sync box and the TV and PC Sync apps. Folks can set the intensity, speed, brightness, 3D positioning, and direction of the light it emits in the Hue app. Available this month, a single wall washer costs a rather spicy $220, or you can snag a two-pack for $385. Select markets already have access to the built-in AI assistant in the Hue app, which you can ask to generate scenes based on your mood or activity, but it's rolling out to the UK in July and globally (including the US) in August. — Simon Hill
Phone Arena
20-06-2025
- Phone Arena
Your iPhone camera can now take better photos thanks to the minds behind Google Pixel
Adobe launched a new iPhone camera app to help you capture sharper, clearer photos. It is free, works on recent iPhones and doesn't even require an Adobe account to start shooting. Adobe just dropped a new computational photography app for iPhones called Project Indigo. And interestingly, one of the people behind it is Marc Levoy, the same guy who helped build the computational photography magic that made Google's early Pixel cameras stand out (and no, it's not available on Android yet, which is kind of ironic).Released last week via Adobe Labs, Project Indigo is free and you won't have to bother with logging into an Adobe account to use it, too. It works on iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max and all iPhone 14 models and up. However, Adobe recommends using it on an iPhone 15 Pro or later for best results. The app captures up to 32 frames and combines them into a single photo – kinda like HDR or Night mode on your iPhone, but taken further with more control and more frames. Sure, you'll sometimes have to wait a few extra seconds after snapping, but the payoff is cleaner shadows, less noise and better dynamic range. See the difference: left is a single iPhone shot in very low light (1/10 lux), while right is Indigo's handheld photo, merged from 32 frames to cut down on noise. | Image credit – Adobe You can also adjust how many frames the app captures in each burst, giving photographers the freedom to choose the right balance between how long the shot takes and how much noise ends up in the photo. Plus, there's a Long Exposure mode for those who want to experiment with cool motion blur effects. Indigo offers a "Long Exposure" button. | Image credit – Adobe The app relies on AI to save photos in both regular dynamic range and the more detailed high dynamic range. Adobe mentions that Project Indigo plays well with Camera Raw and Lightroom for further editing. And, just like you'd want from a pro-level camera app, it gives you hands-on control over things like focus, ISO, shutter speed, white balance (with fine-tuning for warmth and tint), and exposure adjustments. Project Indigo also improves digital zoom by using a multi-frame super-resolution technique. When you zoom in beyond 2×, it snaps several slightly shifted shots – thanks to your natural hand movement – and merges them to create a clearer, sharper photo. On the left, a San Francisco snapshot from an iPhone 16 Pro Max (5x lens, 10x digital zoom). On the right, the same scene via Indigo's multi-frame super-resolution. Notice Indigo's clearer detail and less noise, especially in the building windows. | Image credit – Adobe Unlike some AI zoom tricks that just make up details, this method relies on actual tiny shifts to rebuild the image resolution, resulting in a more authentic and higher-quality app is serving as a testing ground for features that could show up in other top-tier Adobe products, like a tool to remove annoying reflections. Looking ahead, the team is working on adding an Android version, a portrait mode and even video capture capabilities. Your iPhone can take better pics. | Image credit – Adobe One of the coolest things smartphones brought us is having a decent camera right in our pockets – ready to snap good photos with just a tap. Plus, you can edit and share those shots all from the same device, which is super Project Indigo tackles some of the biggest gripes people have with phone photos today – like images that are too bright, lack contrast, have way too much color saturation or suffer from heavy smoothing and sharpening. Adobe is aiming to fix those issues right at the source. Full disclosure: I couldn't try the app myself because I have an iPhone 13 mini, which isn't supported due to 'physical memory constraints' (bummer). The app also doesn't work on iPhone 12 or 12 from what Adobe's shown, Project Indigo looks like a real step up – delivering sharper details, better lighting and photos that look great even blown up on big this is just the beginning, it's exciting to think about what Adobe might bring next – whether that's a new version of Indigo or something fresh that blends mobile photography and editing with next-level computational photography and AI. Oh, and speaking of AI – Adobe's Firefly app just launched on iOS and Android, letting anyone create images and videos just by typing what they want. Secure your connection now at a bargain price! We may earn a commission if you make a purchase This offer is not available in your area.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Hindustan Times
iPhone users can now capture DSLR like photos with Adobe's new camera app
Adobe has released Project Indigo, a free experimental camera app to bring computational photography to iPhones. This app is created by Adobe's Nextcam team, including Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz. Both of them are known for their work on Pixel Camera's computational photography features. The app is a work in progress and is available on the App Store to download. Project Indigo brings computational imaging techniques to smartphone photography by combining them with traditional camera controls. Unlike a stock smartphone camera app that captures a single photo, the Indigo app captures up to 32 underexposed frames per photo. The app then uses computational photography to align these frames to create images with significantly lower noise, higher dynamic range and natural photos. To maintain the natural aesthetics of a photo, this app uses subtle, globally tuned image processing rather than aggressive enhancements. The app supports both JPEG and RAW formats to give photographers the flexibility to extensively edit the photos while retaining the low noise and an improved dynamic range. The Project Indigo app is available on the Apple App Store and is compatible with iPhone Pro and Pro Max models starting from the iPhone 12 series. And for non-pro models, it supports iPhone 14 and onward. For the next experience, Adobe recommends using the iPhone 15 Pro or a new model due to the app's heavy processing requirements. It offers a very simple camera user interface, Photo and Night mode, with all the controls including shutter speed, ISO, white balance and focus, similar to a professional DSLR camera. The app is also seamlessly integrated with the Lightroom mobile app. This allows the users to export images directly to the Lightroom app to adjust the colours and tone. An early access setting lets the user use Project Indigo as a camera app inside the Lightroom app. Project Indigo is available only on iOS devices, and it's free to use without any signup needed. Adobe plans to expand the apps available to Android in the future. The roadmap also includes bringing more photography modes like portrait, panorama, video and advanced exposure. Adobe is also planning to introduce tone presets and looks to give more creative control to the users.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Hindustan Times
A philosophical war over the iPhone camera app
It is not at all intriguing that Adobe's latest release of Project Indigo, a free experimental camera app for the Apple iPhone (there's an Android version coming soon), brings mobile photography back into conversation. Even more so, how it perhaps retrains focus on different approaches to often similar results. One that intersects computational photography with a camera app, or the other that takes a 'zero processing' approach towards delivering photos a user captures on their iPhone. Adobe's new free camera app, called Project Indigo, has been put together by former Pixel camera engineers and combines computational photography with a layer of AI features. Likely, a significant moment in an increasingly competitive third-party camera app ecosystem. Project Indigo, on its part, emerges from an impressive pedigree, having been developed by Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, who were instrumental in establishing the Pixel phones as the benchmark smartphone cameras for many years (and many consider that to be the case even now as well). It wasn't plain sailing, as competition caught up, but Pixel phones made a smart pivot towards computational photography capabilities, when the time was right. With Project Indigo, Levoy and Kainz, have access to the iPhone photography hardware. I've used it to a certain extent, and all I'll say for now is that it is simply not a reimagined version of the Pixel Camera app. This is something that is going much beyond what the default Camera app can do. But here's the thing — not all the time. As a user, there's choice, but for now perhaps not an undeniably definitive one. Project Indigo has a unique computational photography pipeline. 'First, we under-expose more strongly than most cameras. Second, we capture, align, and combine more frames when producing each photo — up to 32 frames as in the example above. This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows. Taking a photo with our app may require slightly more patience after pressing the shutter button than you're used to, but after a few seconds you'll be rewarded with a better picture,' Adobe says. This is where the big change lies — an aggressive multi-frame approach that's a more intensive computational strategy than many competitor apps, with insistence that priority is on image quality (requiring a dash of patience). This should work as well for casual users, as for the more enthusiastic demographic (I wouldn't call them professional, that side of the table has their own preferences), with the option of enabling the full array of manual controls, as well as both JPEG and raw formats. Strength in diversity? The third-party camera app landscape as it stands, reveals a fascinating philosophical divide between different approaches to smartphone photography. Halide Mark II, Camera+ 2 and VSCO, some prime names, and Final Cut Camera and Leica Lux some very likeable ones too. The idea for third-party camera apps has always been to offer a little more in terms of functionality and perhaps unlock certain functionality that the default camera app doesn't have. That's before we get to the main bit — image processing and the differing approaches. At one end of the spectrum lies the 'zero processing' movement. Halide's Process Zero, is an example. This basically means something that has no AI input and no computational photography pipeline in image processing. There are two distinct schools of thought on this — one that believes shunning AI is a better bet to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos, while the other believes AI does enough to accentuate detailing that may otherwise have been missed. It is a philosophical tension. VSCO, for instance, puts forward a proposition of blending the camera app with extensive editing capabilities as well as quick access to social media apps. Halide Mark II positions itself with professional-grade manual controls, and a tech called Neural Macro that allows iPhones without a dedicated macro lens to get photos with that effect. Camera+ 2 uses AI extensively, for scene detection and automatic optimisation while still providing full manual control when needed. I'd say Project Indigo is embracing a bit of the latter, but with certain diversions towards improvement, like they have explained. The fundamental disagreement about image processing is perhaps why we have differing approaches, and thereby preference based choice for users. A user perhaps has to ask themselves which side they lean on. Is the intent to capture reality as accurately as possible, or to create the most visually appealing image regardless of any computational gymnastics required? There will not be a one-size-fits-all answer. Project Indigo's entry into this ecosystem represents more than just another camera app — it signals Adobe's serious interest in mobile photography and computational imaging. Of course they pitch for closer integration with their creative apps, including the Lightroom app for smartphones. I do see Adobe with the biggest trump card up their sleeve — the mix of their own approach to research, in-house AI development which Firefly resoundingly testifies to, and the expertise of former Pixel engineers who know what they're doing. We seem to be at a point where philosophy will provide a foundation for more sophistication. Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives. 11% OFF ₹53,600 Check Details 6% OFF ₹135,900 Check Details 7% OFF ₹111,900 Check Details 8% OFF ₹82,900 Check Details 8% OFF ₹73,500 Check Details 14% OFF ₹59,900 Check Details ₹134,899 Check Details ₹7,999 Check Details ₹9,999 Check Details 5% OFF ₹54,999 Check Details ₹26,999 Check Details ₹15,999 Check Details
