Most people think their smartphone camera is pretty smart already. You point, shoot, and instantly get a photo that’s bright, colorful, and sharp. But sometimes it’s too much, oversharpened, overbright, overdone.
Adobe’s new camera app, called Project Indigo, flips the script. It’s built for folks who want more control, less processing, and photos that look closer to reality, not some hyper-smooth cartoon.
I’ve spent a decade testing cameras and phones, and I’m picky. So when I heard that Project Indigo was designed by true camera geeks, like Marc Levoy, the guy behind Google’s early Pixel cameras, I had to try it.
The app is still in beta for iPhone. It’s rough around the edges, makes my phone hot, and kills my battery. But I’ve never used a phone camera app that felt this thoughtful. It’s made me see my iPhone’s camera in a new way.
Not Your Average Camera App
The first clue that Indigo is for enthusiasts? The onboarding screens. Instead of the usual “here’s how to shoot a photo,” Indigo shows you two histograms you can choose from.
One histogram is from Apple’s usual image processing. The other is from Indigo’s processing pipeline. Most people wouldn’t even know what that means, but for camera nerds, it’s catnip.
The app itself isn’t complicated. It only has two shooting modes: photo and night. It starts in auto, like any normal app. But tap once, and you open up pro controls, shutter speed, ISO, and in night mode, even how many frames to combine into one final shot. That’s not something most phone apps let you decide.
What really makes Indigo stand out isn’t just these controls. It’s the philosophy. Adobe’s developers wrote a whole blog post explaining the “look” they’re going for.
They want to use multi-frame computational tricks (the same tech that makes phone photos so good these days), but without cranking up the noise reduction, brightening every shadow, or making skies glow neon blue.
The Problem With Typical Phone Photos
Let’s back up. For nearly 10 years, your smartphone has probably been snapping multiple photos every time you press the shutter, then merging them into one. That’s how it reduces noise, sharpens details, and keeps highlights from blowing out.
You’d never know it, because the phone does it instantly. And it usually looks good.
But lately, some of us have felt things have gone too far. Take a photo of a bright window and a dark room, and instead of seeing a nice moody interior, your phone evens everything out.
It flattens shadows, brightens dark areas, and you get that washed-out “HDR look.” Skies become turquoise, leaves look like they’ve been outlined with a marker. It’s a style that pops on small phone screens, but it’s not true to what you saw.
Indigo tries to fix that. It does something subtle: it biases the exposure slightly darker. This means it doesn’t have to apply as much smoothing or noise reduction. Textures stay more natural. Shadows stay shadows. It feels more like how your eyes actually see the world.
Plus, Indigo saves files in a format similar to Apple’s ProRAW, multiple frames merged into a DNG. But unlike Apple, Indigo even lets older iPhones that don’t officially support ProRAW take advantage of computational RAW shooting. That’s huge if you have, say, an iPhone 12 mini.
How Indigo’s Photos Look Different
I took Indigo out for a spin against my standard iPhone camera. The first difference I noticed was the sharpening. The iPhone tries to grab every tiny crumb of detail and accentuate it, which can look crispy or harsh. Indigo lets details fade more softly into the background.
Indoors, the difference is even clearer. Indigo keeps whites slightly warmer, which feels more natural. It also lets the dark areas stay dark, instead of lifting them into a muddy gray. It’s a moodier, richer look.
Outdoors, high-contrast scenes sometimes look a bit flatter straight out of the app, but because you’re working with merged RAW files, there’s tons of data there. A quick tweak in Lightroom, and shadows and contrast pop right back without looking fake.
One more technical tidbit: Indigo produces true HDR images. Not just the typical “HDR-ish” flattening. iPhones and Android phones now support an actual HDR format, which uses a special gain map to make highlights on HDR screens really pop.
Indigo’s images look great on these displays, bright highlights but not glaring. It’s more subtle than Apple’s sometimes eye-searing style.
Of course, there’s a price. Indigo merges more frames than Apple’s camera does, which means your phone has to crunch through a lot more data. That heats it up fast. More than once, Indigo threw up a warning saying my iPhone was too hot.
It also eats battery like crazy. This is not the app for snapping hundreds of vacation pics without a charger in your pocket.
Why Not Just Stick With Apple’s Camera?
Playing with Indigo made me appreciate Apple’s default camera even more. It’s designed to be bulletproof. It works instantly, never crashes, and doesn’t murder your battery. It has to work for millions of people who just want to take a quick photo of their dog or grandma.
It can’t risk missing the shot or requiring users to fiddle with settings. And it has to run on everything from the brand-new iPhone 16 Pro to a phone from 2017.
Still, Apple knows some people want more control. That’s why the iPhone 16 includes new Photographic Styles. You can dial in more contrast, warmth, or coolness right from the camera.
It’s not as flexible as shooting RAW, and you can’t use it with Apple’s ProRAW format at the same time. But if you hate how flat your iPhone photos look, it’s a start.
On the other hand, ProRAW does give you RAW files with merged data from multiple frames, just like Indigo. But even there, I found Indigo’s files nicer. When I pulled both into Lightroom and turned down sharpening, the ProRAW images still looked a bit rough.
Indigo’s DNGs had a smoother, darker, slightly warmer feel right from the start. Less work needed to get them looking how I like.
Conclusion: Is Project Indigo Worth It?
Project Indigo isn’t for everyone. Most folks are happy with their phone’s default camera, and they should be. It’s fast, reliable, and almost always gets the shot.
But if you:
- Hate the overly processed, super-bright, crunchy look of typical phone photos
- Want more natural shadows and highlights that aren’t nuked
- Enjoy tweaking RAW files to get exactly the look you want
- Are okay dealing with slower performance, extra heat, and a dying battery
Then Project Indigo might be your dream camera app.
It’s basically an invitation to step behind the curtain and see what’s really going on when your phone takes a photo. You can pick how many frames to merge, watch histograms shift in real time, and save files with a ton of flexibility for editing later.
It won’t replace your everyday camera app. But for those days when you want to slow down and treat your phone more like a manual camera, Indigo is one of the most exciting tools out there. If that sounds fun, you’re exactly the kind of camera nerd this app was made for.
Recommended:
- The Best HP Printers for High-Quality Photo Printing
- How to Instantly Scan a Document on Windows Without Extra Software
- How to disable Apple’s new AI features
This story was created with AI assistance and human editing.
This is exclusive content for our subscribers.
Enter your email address to instantly unlock ALL of the content 100% FREE forever and join our growing community of smart home enthusiasts.
No spam, Unsubscribe at any time.
Lucky you! This thread is empty,
which means you've got dibs on the first comment.
Go for it!