iPhone users can now capture DSLR like photos with Adobe’s new camera app

Adobe’s Project Indigo is a free iPhone app bringing advanced computational photography and manual controls to mobile photographers.

Adobe has released Project Indigo, a free experimental camera app to bring computational photography to iPhones. This app is created by Adobe’s Nextcam team, including Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz. Both of them are known for their work on Pixel Camera’s computational photography features. The app is a work in progress and is available on the App Store to download.

What is Project Indigo?

Project Indigo brings advanced computational photography to iPhones. (Adobe)

By Amit Rahi

For the past seven years, I have tracked consumer tech through constant shifts in hardware, platforms, and the way people actually use devices. Covering everything from budget gear to flagship hardware, I focus on what readers need to know, not on buzzwords or launch cycle hype. My expertise spans gaming laptops and chairs, high-performance PCs, gaming monitors, printers, smartwatches, earphones, headphones, Bluetooth speakers, tablets, and more, with a particular emphasis on how these products hold up in daily use. Reviews, explainers, buying guides, and news pieces all share the same goal: giving readers enough detail to make confident decisions without wading through fluff. Away from deadlines, I spend a lot of time gaming and watching films and anime, which naturally filters back into the work. Performance, comfort, display quality, and sound are judged the way players and viewers experience them, not just by lab numbers, which keeps my coverage grounded in real scenarios rather than just benchmarks.

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Project Indigo brings computational imaging techniques to smartphone photography by combining them with traditional camera controls. Unlike a stock smartphone camera app that captures a single photo, the Indigo app captures up to 32 underexposed frames per photo. The app then uses computational photography to align these frames to create images with significantly lower noise, higher dynamic range and natural photos.

To maintain the natural aesthetics of a photo, this app uses subtle, globally tuned image processing rather than aggressive enhancements. The app supports both JPEG and RAW formats to give photographers the flexibility to extensively edit the photos while retaining the low noise and an improved dynamic range.

How to use Project Indigo on your iPhone?

The Project Indigo app is available on the Apple App Store and is compatible with iPhone Pro and Pro Max models starting from the iPhone 12 series. And for non-pro models, it supports iPhone 14 and onward. For the next experience, Adobe recommends using the iPhone 15 Pro or a new model due to the app’s heavy processing requirements.

It offers a very simple camera user interface, Photo and Night mode, with all the controls including shutter speed, ISO, white balance and focus, similar to a professional DSLR camera. The app is also seamlessly integrated with the Lightroom mobile app. This allows the users to export images directly to the Lightroom app to adjust the colours and tone. An early access setting lets the user use Project Indigo as a camera app inside the Lightroom app.

Project Indigo availability

Project Indigo is available only on iOS devices, and it's free to use without any signup needed. Adobe plans to make the apps available for Android in the future. The roadmap also includes bringing more photography modes like portrait, panorama, video and advanced exposure. Adobe is also planning to introduce tone presets and looks to give more creative control to the users.