Project Indigo
Allison Johnson (2025):
Adobe’s Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds. It’s the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo’s basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera — just the thing for a camera nerd like me.
If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you’re tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It’s available in beta on iOS, though it is not — and I stress this — for the faint of heart. It’s slow, it’s prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it’s the most thoughtfully designed camera experience I’ve ever used on a phone, and it gave me a renewed sense of curiosity about the camera I use every day.
I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps. But Adobe also says they’re targeting “casual” photographers, which seems misguided.
[…]
You can’t adjust the tone mapping like you can with Photographic Styles. You’re supposed to take it into Lightroom and treat it like the RAW output of a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
The default result tends to be much more naturalistic than the Camera app.
I’m deeply intrigued by Indigo, and I have a few friends who’ve shown me some extraordinary photographs taken with the app. If they hadn’t told me, I’d have wagered their photos were taken with dedicated large-sensor digital cameras, not phones.
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Looks like a good app. If it gets popular it will become part of Adobe Cloudpay for Life and will be re-designed as a garbage web app that takes up 2 GB of storage and 5 GB of RAM and defocuses text entry fields as soon as you type inside them.
Luckily I don't need a single Adobe app for anything I do and if I ever did I would find a different profession. Installing a single Adobe app with their garbage installers and cloud managers and licensing daemons and font libraries and helpers for your every predicted action sprinkles permanent garbage all over your Mac and the only way to reclaim sanity is to wipe and start over, resolving like I have to never again let a single piece of their refuse on your machine.
