Latest news with #ProjectIndigo
The Verge
2 days ago
- 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
Digital Trends
5 days ago
- Digital Trends
Adobe made the best iPhone camera app you haven't tried yet, and it's free
A year ago, a rather interesting camera tool came out from the house of Lux, makers of the fantastic Kino and Halide apps. The tool is called Process Zero, which essentially ripped the images of Apple's computational adjustments and delivered a pristine photo. I even compared the current-gen iPhone with the iPhone 6s and realized the ills of computational photography. What I noticed repeatedly was that algorithmic processing makes the photos look sharper and more colorful, but they aren't always accurate. And in doing so, they lose their natural charm. Recommended Videos That's one of the reasons why vintage camera filter apps are popular, and film photography is also having its moment. The latest name to throw its hat in the iPhone camera arena is Adobe, and the solution is called Project Indigo, a camera app that wants to replicate the 'SLR-like' look on your iPhone. What's it all about? Indigo is what you would call a distilled pro-grade container. You get a healthy few manual controls, and even the ability to decide the number of frames that must be fused. On the other end of the rope, you get a custom image processing, aka computational photography pipeline, developed by Adobe's team. It allows only photo capture, and throws a dedicated night mode into the mix, as well. The fun part is that despite the manual controls, the app keeps capturing pictures even before you hit the shutter button. Those 'extra' frames are a part of the fusion system to ensure that your photos don't have motion artifacts or look blurry. On the qualitative side of things, Adobe says it performs 'mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening.' Adobe claims it doesn't perform smoothing effects, and even retains noise in the pictures to deliver an authentic shot. The most alluring aspect of Indigo's image capture is the multi-frame super-resolution, which kicks into action as soon as you kick beyond 2x or 10x (aka the natural zoom range of the lenses). For zoom capture, there are a few compromises. For example, if you're pushing the iPhone 16 Pro's 5x telephoto lens and electronic stabilization is enabled, Adobe says the frame is cropped by 10%, and some drift also happens, though image quality remains unaffected. Moreover, it's an AI-based scaling, so the results might not always look as refined. On the positive side, zooming in on long-range shots shows less grainy textures than a picture clicked using the pre-installed iPhone camera app. Moreover, all the images clicked by Indigo are saved in a DNG format, which is lighter than Apple's ProRAW files, but contains nearly as much detail. Plus, DNGs are ideal for editing, so there's that. Now, let's talk about the Pro-grade controls. There's a histogram at the top to display sensor data, but you can also enable the timer, composition grids, a level indicator, and zebra-striping from the settings section. You can play with exposure time and ISO, focus, white balance, and exposure compensation. Indigo can't lock the exposure at the moment, but Adobe says it will land soon in the Indigo app. How is the output? Right off the bat, the iPhone's camera would seem to capture sharper photos with a more vibrant color profile. But when you compare the shots clicked by Indigo, a few differences become apparent. First, surface textures start looking a tad unrealistic due to the sharpening done by the iPhone. Moreover, the approach it takes to rendering highlights and shadows is rather brute, because the focus is always on delivering brighter pictures with more surface details, so you often miss out on how light reflections and darker areas of a frame naturally looked. Indigo's clicks look a tad softer, and they take a more mellow approach to reducing noise even in daylight shots, so the pictures seem like a more accurate rendition of the real frame. When we talk about realism, it's not just the light behavior, but also the color chemistry. As the iPhone prefers higher exposure, elements like the tree foliage tend to look overtly vibrant. Indigo takes a more subtle approach to the image processing, and as a result, the leaves look more natural, albeit a tad subdued at saturation. The real gem is the editing pipeline. Indigo captures the same frame in two formats: JPEG (with HDR and SDR looks) and DNG. From the app's built-in gallery, as you export photos to Lightroom, the DNG files are imported automatically, which gives you a lot more headroom with editing. Take a look at the image below, where I achieved that look in just about 15 seconds: The situation is not too different during low-light capture. The iPhone tends to go with a higher exposure, and as a result, struggles with color realism, especially when there are light streaks of different colors coming in from different directions. Indigo does a much better job at handling colors atop reflected surface light, especially at high zoom range when frame fusion kicks into action. In the images below, which are taken at a 10x zoom level, the iPhone struggles with containing noise not just around the light source, but also the wall. There's a lot of grainy texture, and the real coat of paint looks entirely different, muddying up the contrast. It has more elements to see, but at the same time, it also looks chaotic. The frame captured by the Indigo app shows much better control at separating strong illumination from the object's boundary, giving it a sharper look in total darkness. Moreover, it has a far more restrained grain output, and most importantly, the wall's color is true to the real shade of paint coat applied over it. Fixing the iPhone's camera flaws Here's another sample. Take a look at this shot of a cloudy day. Once again, the iPhone goes for a warmer color tone, with a high level of sharpening done to the cloud texture. The color of the sky, however, is bluish and more accurate in the shot captured by the Indigo camera app. Moroever, it also does a better job of exposing the foliage in the trees. Yet, it's not a straightforward victory for either. If you zoom in, you'll notice that the iPhone retains a tighter control over sharpness and texture, and as a result, the windows on the building and the tree leaves appear a lot sharper. In the picture clicked by Adobe's app, you will notice a lot of grainy texture in the background elements and a lack of clarity with lines and shapes. Indigo really shines where the iPhone runs into its limits. Take a look at the low-light shots below, which were captured at 10x zoom range from a rather dark alley. The iPhone struggled with handling noise and produced a lot of grain in the picture. Almost everything, including the direct and indirect light streaks, looks fuzzy. Indigo benefited from using the Multi-frame super-resolution tech. I manually set it to merge 32 shots while still in handheld mode. The resulting shot was a night and day difference compared to the native iPhone camera app. The image is smoother, with far better contrast, color output, and subject sharpness. It lacks the typical characteristics of night mode photography on smartphones. Finally, this is my favorite sample, where I put macro capabilities to the test. Once again, the iPhone defaults to a yellowish color tint. In doing so, it couldn't properly highlight the color of the iris. At close range, it also gave a fuzzy character to the fur above the eye region, and there's a lot of noise around the nose area. In the shot captured by Indigo, the fur texture is cleaner and looks more natural. The app also did a fantastic job at bringing out the eye color and the subtle pink on the nose, without giving it the same tint as the rest of the frame. Should you jump in? Now, before you get too excited by the premise of a free camera app made by Adobe, and one which offers a superior output compared to the iPhone, there are a few aspects you must keep in mind. The Indigo app tries to solve one of the iPhone's biggest camera woes: the algorithmic processing. Most of the time, it does a fantastic job, but there are a few gaps that apps like Indigo try to fill. Color realism, better night mode output, and pro-grade controls are just a few of them. But to get the best out of it, you must know the basics of frame composition controls. Moreover, the secret sauce is simultaneous DNG capture, a file format that is tailor-made for post-processing and editing in apps. Specifically, Adobe Lightroom which is loaded with fine-tuning tools, but pretty expensive at the same time. Then there are a few technical hiccups. Image processing takes a lot of time, and if you close the app, the progress is lost. Moreover, the app is quite demanding on the local resources, and I regularly got 'iPhone overheating' warnings while taking pictures. If you like to tinker with pictures, go ahead and play with Indigo. Otherwise, for an average iPhone user, it's just another camera app. You just might end up liking it. Otherwise, the pre-installed iPhone camera app will serve you just fine.
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Business Standard
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
VSCO to launch new iPhone camera app 'Capture' with film-style presets
Visual Supply Co. (VSCO) is launching a new iPhone camera app called Capture, designed as a third-party alternative to Apple's native camera. According to a report by 9To5Mac, Capture focuses on enhancing the photography experience by allowing users to apply film-style presets before taking a shot—eliminating the need for post-processing. The launch comes shortly after Adobe debuted its own camera app, Project Indigo, which brings computational photography and manual controls to iPhones, along with Lightroom integration for editing. VSCO Capture app: Details Citing Bloomberg's Chris Welch, the report notes that Capture aims to shift focus from editing to the moment of image capture. Unlike VSCO's primary app, which centres on editing photos after they're taken, Capture allows users to select their desired film-like aesthetic beforehand. At launch, the app will offer 50 of VSCO's most popular presets for instant use. Users can toggle between automatic and manual modes, with options to adjust shutter speed, exposure compensation, and visual effects like bloom and halation. 'Photographers increasingly are moving away from using overly complicated editing software and are using apps that make it easier to get that right moment with a desired aesthetic right at the point of capture,' said VSCO CEO Eric Wittman in an interview with Welch. Capture will be free to use with a VSCO account. While it will not include AI-powered tools at launch, such features may appear later in VSCO's flagship app. The Capture app will start rolling out in select markets including Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand by the end of this week. A wider global rollout is planned for later this summer.
India.com
20-06-2025
- India.com
Tired Of Overedited iPhone Photos? Adobe Launches Free Camera App For iPhone—Built By Pixel Camera Creators
New Delhi: Have you ever felt like your iPhone Photos look a bit too bright or overly edited? Adobe has launched a new iPhone-only camera app called Project Indigo. The app has been built by the same team behind Google's Pixel camera. Unlike typical smartphone apps, it offers more manual control and aims to deliver a DSLR-style photo experience. It's free to download on the App Store for now. More Natural, True-to-Life Photos Adobe says its new app, Indigo, aims to deliver more natural, true-to-life images—closer to what you'd get from a DSLR. There's less smoothing, less over-sharpening, and the colour adjustments are subtle, avoiding that overly edited 'HDR' look common in regular phone cameras. Full Manual Camera Controls Indigo gives you full manual control over your camera settings like focus, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance. You can choose to shoot in JPEG or RAW (DNG), and even decide how many frames the app captures for each shot. Why does that matter? Because Indigo uses advanced tech to blend up to 32 images into one, helping reduce noise and keep all the details sharp. Night Mode & Long Exposure for Creative Shots Indigo also includes a Night mode that suggests longer exposures in low light, helping you get clearer shots in the dark. There's even a Long Exposure setting to create smooth, motion-blur effects—perfect for capturing waterfalls, flowing traffic, or glowing city lights. Clearer Zoomed-In Shots Adobe says with Indigo, zoomed-in photos will look much clearer and less blurry. Instead of guessing what the image should look like using AI, the app uses a clever trick called multi-frame super-resolution—it quickly snaps several shots when you zoom and blends them together to give you a sharper, more detailed photo. Adobe is also working on a live preview feature, which will let you see how your edited photo will look right in the viewfinder—before you even press the shutter. That could totally change the way people frame and shoot photos on their phones.
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Business Standard
20-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Tech Wrap June 20: Vivo Y400 Pro, Adobe Project Indigo app, OPPO Reno 14
Vivo Y400 Pro launched. Adobe's Project Indigo app for iPhones. OPPO Reno 14 series. Jio's gaming recharge plans. Samsung Galaxy M36. Spotify prepares for Hi-Fi launch. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 Tech Wrap June 20 BS Tech New Delhi Vivo Y400 Pro with MediaTek Dimensity 7300, AI features launched Vivo officially released the Y400 Pro in India on June 20. Priced from ₹24,999, the device comes equipped with a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor and a 6.78-inch 3D curved AMOLED screen. Vivo claims this to be the slimmest 3D curved display in its category. The smartphone also features various AI tools designed to boost user performance and productivity. Adobe has rolled out Project Indigo, a new camera app for iPhones that incorporates computational photography. According to the company, the app captures images with an SLR-style natural look and provides a full set of manual controls. It also includes Lightroom support for advanced editing and a 'Technology Preview' space to test upcoming AI-powered tools. OPPO has teased the launch of its Reno 14 series in India on its official site. Following their China debut last month, the Reno 14 and Reno 14 Pro are expected to launch in India with comparable specs. The smartphones will use MediaTek chipsets and integrate various AI features. Reliance Jio has teamed up with Krafton India, creators of Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), to unveil the country's first gaming-centric recharge plans. These plans are tailored for BGMI players and come with in-game rewards, mobile data bundles, and access to cloud gaming. Samsung has officially announced the Galaxy M36 5G's India launch for June 27. The company previewed the device's design on its X (formerly Twitter) account and revealed some key features ahead of the launch. The phone will be part of the M-series and is set to enter the sub-₹20,000 market segment. Spotify is seemingly nearing the release of its long-promised lossless audio option. New findings from the desktop app reference a 'Lossless' tier, indicating that the feature, first introduced in 2021, might soon be launched. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7 is anticipated to be revealed during the upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event, likely on July 9. Leaked renders show the device in Blue Shadow and Jet Black hues, with reports from Android Headlines hinting at two additional colors. Nothing has previewed its upcoming 'Glyph Matrix' interface, which will debut with the Nothing Phone 3. In a teaser shared on X (formerly Twitter), the brand showed a dot-matrix-style LED setup on the phone's rear corner. The teaser, captioned 'When light becomes language,' suggests this system might support customizable animations, notifications, or even interactive mini games like Snake. Following the release of update 1.01.1 for Elden Ring Nightreign earlier this month, Bandai Namco has introduced enhanced difficulty for certain battles. Players now face tougher versions of the Nightlord enemies, known as 'Everdark Sovereigns,' offering a more intense challenge. According to CNBC, Google is training its Gemini and Veo 3 AI models using select YouTube videos. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed the company leverages its video repository for AI development but emphasized that only a curated subset is used for training. Google is introducing a new visual update for its Android Phone app through a Material 3 Expressive redesign. As reported by 9To5Google, the beta version now includes fresh gesture controls like 'Horizontal swipe' and 'Single tap' for answering calls, alongside a complete interface overhaul. Google's Gemini app on Android now includes a song identification feature, allowing users to find out which song is playing nearby by asking the app directly. This update restores a function once offered by Google Assistant, offering a Shazam-like experience. Apple is reportedly on track to launch its first foldable iPhone by the second half of 2026. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated that Apple is finalizing display specifications, while details on components like the hinge are still under review. Foxconn is planning to begin production of iPhone enclosures—essentially the device's metal or glass exterior frames—at a new facility located in Oragadam, Tamil Nadu. The manufacturing unit will be set up within ESR Industrial Park, according to The Economic Times. Krutrim, the AI startup founded by Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, has acquired BharatSah'AI'yak—an AI platform developed by Samagra. The move aims to enhance Krutrim's influence and operations in India's public sector tech ecosystem. What would you do if someone quietly copied your house keys and made millions of duplicates? That's what just happened on the internet. Except instead of house keys, it's passwords—and 16 billion of them. A report by Cybernews and Forbes has confirmed what cybersecurity experts feared: the largest password leak in history is now live, with billions of credentials up for sale on the dark web. The scale is staggering, the implications global.
