Adobe Quietly Releases a Superior Free Camera App for iPhones

Adobe has released, without fanfare, a work-in-progress camera app for iPhones that shows tremendous promise, and I think it will excite photographers. The app is part of Adobe's Indigo Project.

Here are some Adobe-provided sample images:

Adobe believes modern mobile phone cameras have become quite good in terms of color, resolution, and dynamic range, but they can be held back by the software that controls them. Adobe says smartphone pictures often look overly bright, have low contrast, and high color saturation, with overly strong smoothing and sharpening. They also believe, quite rightly, that smartphones don't give you enough manual control over aperture, exposure time, ISO, and focus, and they know that photographers want the ability to save photos in a raw format. Some smartphone apps have copied these features—except for aperture, which is typically fixed on a mobile camera.

This Project Indigo app is the result.

Adobe:

Today, we are releasing this for iPhone as a free mobile app from Adobe Labs, available in the Apple App Store—to share our progress and get feedback from the community. The app offers full manual controls, a more natural ("SLR-like") look, and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide—in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduces some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps.

Adobe has outlined some of the features of the app in their White Paper:

First, we underexpose 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.

As a side benefit of these two strategies, Adobe says they need less spatial denoising (i.e., smoothing) than most camera apps. This means Indigo preserves more natural textures. In fact, we bias our processing towards minimal smoothing, even if this means leaving a bit of noise in the photo.

One more thing. Many of our users prefer to shoot raw, not JPEGs, and they want these raw images to benefit from computational photography. (Some big cameras offer the ability to capture bursts of images and combine them in-camera, but they output a JPEG, not a raw file.) Indigo can output JPEG or raw files that benefit equally from the computational photography strategy.

You can see in this example photo from Adobe how striking the dynamic range appears after taking multiple shots.

Also, long exposures are possible with or without a tripod, as in this Adobe provided image:

The Indigo app can output DNG and JPEG images. DNG provides a benefit that most raw images do not—the aligning and merging of multiple frames. This gives them high dynamic range and low noise. They are also stored before demosaicking (i.e., one color per pixel instead of three), so they are smaller than Apple's ProRAW files with no loss in quality. Finally, they are available on recent non-Pro iPhones, while ProRAW files are not.

Also, according to Adobe, the app’s AI produces two looks—standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR). They store both looks in the JPEG using a new hybrid SDR/HDR format that has been adopted by Adobe, Apple, Google, Meta, and many others.

Indigo is designed to work with Adobe's ecosystem (Lightroom, Photoshop) either in desktop or mobile versions, but you can use other editors as well.

There are many other features as well, and since the app is free, I strongly suggest you get it from the iOS App Store and give it a spin.

I gave it a brief test around the neighborhood, and it did take some time to get used to the controls on the screen, but happily, it brought up suggestions on controls that were context-aware.

For example, when I shot some flowers, it suggested close-up mode, and it presented the close-up icon to tap on.

Indigo is not a finished product. It will evolve, and Adobe considers it a technology preview.

The app runs on all Pro and Pro Max iPhones starting from series 12, and on all non-Pro iPhones starting from series 14. (That said, the app does some pretty heavy computing, so you'll have a better experience on a newer iPhone.) It requires no Adobe sign-on at present and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.

An Android app, Adobe assures, will be coming, and new features Adobe is thinking about include exposure bracketing, focus bracketing, and a number of other multi-frame modes where one or more camera parameters are varied between frames.

This is a very exciting app. Give it a try and see what you think. I was very impressed during my brief tests, and I expect you will be too.