Project Indigo

Welcome to Project Indigo, a new camera experience from Adobe Labs. With a custom computational photography pipeline, a natural image look, and full set of manual camera controls, it offers something for professional and casual photographers alike. In addition, we introduce new controls for computational cameras for the first time and offer a glimpse into the future of AI image processing on our Tech Previews page.

A COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY CAMERA

Instead of capturing a single photo, Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range. And all this at the press of a shutter button.

PHOTO MODE VS NIGHT MODE

Photo mode is intended for everyday use in good lighting, and has zero shutter lag, meaning it captures the moment you wanted.

Night mode is intended for use in low light. In this mode images are captured after you press the shutter button (so with some shutter lag), but use longer exposure times, further reducing noise.

NATURAL LOOK

Photos produced by Indigo employ computational photography and AI to produce a natural (SLR-like) look for your photos, including special (but gentle) treatment of subjects and skies. This look is applied when generating JPEG images and is embedded as a rendering suggestion in raw DNG files (if enabled). All raw pixels remain intact – the look does not alter them.

PRO CONTROLS

Using these you can take full control of how Indigo captures the image, manually specifying focus, exposure time and ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance. Focus control includes an optional magnified loupe for setting precise focus, and white balance control allows you to tap on an object known to be neutral gray.

Unique to Indigo’s Night mode is manual control over the number of frames aligned and merged into a final photo. More frames result in lower noise but a longer time to capture a photo. There is also a Long Exposure mode: if the phone is on a tripod, this allows the capture of synthetic long exposure effects like “water-into-silk".

SUPER-RESOLUTION FOR ZOOM

Using pinch-to-zoom in any camera app often results in image quality loss. To recover the image Indigo employs multi-frame super-resolution which can restore much of the lost quality. Look for the ‘SR’ indicator on the zoom buttons to know when it is active.

AI DENOISE

One such technology is a variant of the AI-based denoising technology available in Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It requires raw DNG as input, and it saves a new DNG to your camera roll.

REMOVE REFLECTIONS

Another example is a variant of the AI-based Remove Reflections technology from Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It requires a DNG as input, and it saves a medium-resolution JPEG to your camera roll. The technology is designed to address only one kind of reflection - shooting through plate glass windows that cover most of the camera field of view.