Adobe released an iPhone camera app with full manual controls

For photography enthusiasts, the prosumer camera app market has had no shortage of great options, with longtime favorites like Halide from Lux leading the pack. Now, Adobe has decided to enter the picture (get it?) with a free experimental app from the same team behind the original Google Pixel camera.

If you remember the early days of the Google Pixel and its heavy focus on computational photography, you already have a sense of what this team, now at Adobe, cares about and is capable of. Its new app, Project Indigo, brings that same spirit to the iPhone, but with a few key differences.

Less “smartphone look”

At its core, Project Indigo is Adobe’s answer to the biggest complaints about smartphone photos today: “overly bright, low contrast, high color saturation, strong smoothing, and strong sharpening“.

Here’s how the team behind Project Indigo presents the app:

This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe – towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI. Our hope is that Indigo will appeal to casual mobile photographers who want a natural SLR-like look for their photos, including when viewed on large screens; to advanced photographers who want manual control and the highest possible image quality; and to anyone – casual or serious – who enjoys playing with new photographic experiences.

Computational photography, with an emphasis on photography

Project Indigo takes an interesting approach to multi-frame image capture, combining up to 32 underexposed frames for a single shot to reduce noise and preserve highlight detail. If that sounds like what your iPhone’s default camera does with HDR or Night mode… it is. But Project Indigo pushes things further, with more control and more frames.

The trade-off? You’ll sometimes wait a few extra seconds after pressing the shutter, but the payoff is cleaner shadows, less noise, and more dynamic range.

Another nice touch: Project Indigo applies this same multi-frame computational stack even when outputting RAW/DNG files, not just JPEGs. That’s something most smartphone camera apps don’t do.

Full manual controls (and then some)

As you’d hope from an advanced camera app, Project Indigo brings manual control over focus, ISO, shutter speed, white balance (with temperature and tint), and exposure compensation.

But it also “offers control over the number of frames in the burst”, letting photographers have full control over capture time versus noise levels. There’s even a “Long Exposure” mode, which is perfect for creative motion blur effects.

Digital zoom without the watercolor AI hallucinations

Project Indigo also tackles digital zoom quality with multi-frame super-resolution. If you pinch zoom past 2× (or 10× on the telephoto lens of iPhone 16 Pro Max), the app automatically captures multiple slightly offset frames (using your natural handshake) and combines them to build a sharper final image.

But unlike AI-processed super-res tools that sometimes invent detail, this technique uses real-world micro-shifts to reconstruct resolution, promising a much better result.

Built for Lightroom users

Given that this is an Adobe project, it’s no surprise that Project Indigo integrates tightly with Lightroom Mobile. After capture, you can send images straight into Lightroom for editing, whether you’re working with the JPEG or the DNG.

In fact, Adobe has even built in profile and metadata support that lets Lightroom know the difference between Project Indigo‘s SDR and HDR “looks”, making it easy to toggle between them during editing.

Experimental features baked right in

This is also Adobe Labs territory, meaning Project Indigo doubles as a testbed for features that may roll out more broadly across Adobe’s ecosystem later. One cool early example: an AI-powered “Remove Reflections” mode that helps clean up photos shot through windows or glass.

Project Indigo runs on all iPhone Pro and Pro Max models starting from iPhone 12, plus all non-Pro iPhones starting from iPhone 14. The app is free, requires no Adobe account, and is available now on the App Store. That said, given how CPU-intensive the app’s image pipeline is, Adobe recommends running it on a newer iPhone for the best experience.

Be sure to visit the Project Indigo website and check out the many lossless sample photos they made available to present the app. You can also download it from the App Store if you’d like to try it for yourself.

Via Tecnoblog