The Minds Behind Google Pixel Camera Launch New App: Adobe’s Project Indigo
Adobe has officially launched “Project Indigo,” a groundbreaking iPhone camera app poised to redefine smartphone photography. Developed by a team including computational photography pioneers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, formerly of Google’s Pixel camera team, Project Indigo aims to deliver a more natural and professional look to mobile photos, blending advanced computational techniques with extensive manual controls and AI-powered features.
A Corrective to Over-Processing
Project Indigo emerges as a direct response to common frustrations among smartphone users regarding limited controls and overly processed images. Levoy and Kainz, in their announcement, articulated their vision for a “more natural look — more like what an SLR might produce,” eschewing the aggressive tone mapping and sharpening prevalent in many default camera apps. Instead, Project Indigo employs “only mild tone mapping, boosting of colour saturation, and sharpening,” steering clear of the “zero-processing” trend favoured by some third-party applications.
Unparalleled Control and Quality
The app promises “the highest image quality that computational photography can provide,” offering users the flexibility of both JPEG and RAW outputs. Dramatically underexposing individual shots achieves this, and then combining a significantly larger number of frames, up to 32, to construct the final image.
Beyond its core computational photography engine, Project Indigo integrates some of Adobe’s more experimental photo features, including an AI-powered “Remove Reflections” tool designed to eliminate unwanted reflections from photographs intelligently.
The Pixel Brains Behind Indigo
Marc Levoy, who departed Google in 2020 to join Adobe, spearheaded the team with the explicit goal of creating a “universal camera app.” Florian Kainz joined Adobe in the same year, reuniting with Levoy to bring their expertise in computational photography to the Adobe ecosystem. The duo is widely credited with popularising the concept of computational photography during their tenure at Google, a movement that has since driven significant innovation and competition within the smartphone camera industry.
Project Indigo represents a corrective to the “camera arms race” that, while raising the bar for smartphone photo quality, has also led to a proliferation of often “over-the-top” processed images. Its release marks an intriguing test of whether a third-party application, focused on delivering superior photographic quality and a more natural aesthetic, can effectively challenge the dominance of default smartphone camera apps.
Availability
Project Indigo is currently available for free download on iPhones 12 Pro and later, as well as iPhone 14 and later models. An Android version of the app is slated for future release.
