The Adobe Project Indigo application makes me rethink telephone photography

Adobe Indigo’s project is A camera application built by camera ducks for the camera’s nerds. It is the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter, also known as one of the pioneers of computer photography with his work on early pixels. The basic promise of Indigo is a reasonable approach to image processing while taking full advantage of calculation techniques. He also invites you to the normally opaque processes that occur when you press the shutter button on your phone camera – just the thing for a camera like me.

If you hate the too aggressive HDR look, or if you are tired of the sharpening of your iPhone, your photos, Project Indigo could be for you. It is available in beta on iOS, although it is not – And I emphasize this – for the less hearts. It’s slow, it is inclined to heat my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it is the experience of the most thoughtful camera that I have never used on a phone, and it gave me a feeling of renewed curiosity about the camera that I use every day.

You will know that this is not your apparatus of garden variety camera directly from integration screens. A section details the difference between two histograms available to use with the live preview image (one is based on the clean processing of indigo and one is based on the Apple image pipeline). Another line describes how the application manages the treatment of subjects and the sky as “special (but sweet)”. It is a camera’s love language.

The application is not very complicated. There are two capture modes: photo and night. It starts in auto, and you can switch the pro checks with a tap. This mode gives you access to the shutter speed, ISO and, if you are in night mode, the possibility of specifying the number of frames that the application will capture and merger to create your final image. It reigns.

Indigo’s philosophy has as much to do with image processing as with the shooting experience. A Blog article accompanying the launch of the application Explains a large part of the reflection behind the indigo “look” tries to achieve. The idea is to exploit the advantages of multi-trame calculation treatment without the final photo that has not been excessive. Capturing several images and merge them into a single image is essentially the way all telephone cameras work, allowing them to create images with less noise, better details and a higher dynamic range than they would capture it otherwise with their tiny sensors.

Telephone cameras have been taking photos like this for almost a decade, but in the past two years, there has been a growing feeling that treatment has become heavy and not attached to reality. The high contrast scenes appear flat and “HDR-Ish”, the sky seems more blue than ever in real life, and the sharpening designed to optimize the photos for small screens makes the fine details crunchy.

Indigo targets a more natural look, as well as great flexibility for gross post-processing files yourself. As Apple Proraw formatIndigo DNG files contain data from multiple and merged frames – a traditional gross file contains data in a single frame. Indigo’s approach differs from that of Apple in several ways; He biaises towards darker exposures, which allows him to apply less noise reduction and smoothing. Indigo also offers gross calculation capture on certain iPhones that do not support Apple Proraw, which is reserved for recent pro-mones.

After wandering to take photos with the native and indigo iPhone camera application, the difference in sharpening was one of the first things I noticed. Instead of searching and cracking each breadcrumbs that he can find, the treatment of indigo allows details to gracefully fade in the background.

I particularly like the way Indigo manages high contrast scenes inside. The white balance is slightly hotter than the standard appearance of the iPhone, and indigo allows shadows, where the iPhone prefers to brighten them up. It’s a whole mood, And I love it. High contrast scenes outside tend towards a brighter and flat exposure, but the raw files offer a ton of latitude to bring the contrast and pump the shadows. I generally do not bother to shoot Raw on a smartphone, but Indigo makes me think that.

Whether you turn RAW or JPEG, Indigo (and the iPhone camera, by the way) produces HDR photos – not to be confused with a dish, HDR, HDR-ish picture. I mean the real The HDR image formats that IOS and Android now support, using a gain card to burst the strengths with a little additional brightness. Since Indigo does not apply as much clarification to your photo, these strengths appear in a pleasant way that does not seem brilliant of the eyes because it can sometimes use the standard camera application. This is a camera designed for an HDR screen era and I’m here for that.

According to the blog post, Indigo captures and merges more frames for each image than the standard camera application. It is all at high processor intensity, and it does not take much time to trigger a warning in the application that your phone overheats. The treatment takes more time and is a real battery killer, so bring a battery on your shoots.

All this makes me appreciate the work that the application of native iPhone camera must do even more. It is the most popular camera in the world, and it must be everything for everyone at the same time. It must be fast and economical in battery. He must also work on this year’s model, the model of last year and a phone of seven years ago. If he crashes at the wrong time and is missing a unique moment, or underestimate the face of your great-uncle in the family photo, the consequences are important. There are only so many freedoms as Apple and other manufacturers of phone cameras can take the name of the aesthetics.

To this end, the iPhone 16 series includes Remained photographic stylesEssentially allowing you to refine the tone card it applies to your images to modify contrast, heat or brightness. It does not offer the flexibility of raw shooting – and you cannot use it alongside the raw format of Apple – but it is a good starting point if you think that your photos of your iPhone seem too flat.

Between photographic styles and Proraw, you can get results from the native camera application that looks very like the indigo project. But you have to work for it; These options are intentionally out of reach in the main camera application and abstract. Proraw files always seem a little more crunchy than indigo DNGs, even when I take them to Lightroom and turn all along. Indigo DNGS and Proraw files include a color profile to serve as a starting point for changes; I generally preferred the warmer and slightly darker indigo image processing. It takes a little more fusion with the cursors to get a pro -raw image where I love it.

Project Indigo invites you into the usually mysterious process of taking a photo with a phone camera. It is not an application for everyone, but if this description seems intriguing, then you are my kind of camera.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge