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The Verge
17 hours ago
- The Verge
Adobe's new camera app is making me rethink phone photography
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. This isn't your garden-variety camera app You'll know this isn't your garden-variety camera app right from the onboarding screens. One section details the difference between two histograms available to use with the live preview image (one is based on Indigo's own processing and one is based on Apple's image pipeline). Another line describes the way the app handles processing of subjects and skies as 'special (but gentle).' This is a camera nerd's love language. The app isn't very complicated. There are two capture modes: photo and night. It starts you off in auto, and you can toggle pro controls on with a tap. This mode gives you access to shutter speed, ISO, and, if you're in night mode, the ability to specify how many frames the app will capture and merge to create your final image. That rules. Indigo's philosophy has as much to do with image processing as it does with the shooting experience. A blog post accompanying the app's launch explains a lot of the thinking behind the 'look' Indigo is trying to achieve. The idea is to harness the benefits of multi-frame computational processing without the final photo looking over-processed. Capturing multiple frames and merging them into a single image is basically how all phone cameras work, allowing them to create images with less noise, better detail, and higher dynamic range than they'd otherwise capture with their tiny sensors. Phone cameras have been taking photos like this for almost a decade, but over the past couple of years, there's been a growing sense that processing has become heavy-handed and untethered from reality. High-contrast scenes appear flat and 'HDR-ish,' skies look more blue than they ever do in real life, and sharpening designed to optimize photos for small screens makes fine details look crunchy. Indigo aims for a more natural look, as well as ample flexibility for post-processing RAW files yourself. Like Apple's ProRAW format, Indigo's DNG files contain data from multiple, merged frames — a traditional RAW file contains data from just one frame. Indigo's approach differs from Apple's in a few ways; it biases toward darker exposures, allowing it to apply less noise reduction and smoothing. Indigo also offers computational RAW capture on some iPhones that don't support Apple's ProRAW, which is reserved for recent Pro iPhones. After wandering around taking photos with both the native iPhone camera app and Indigo, the difference in sharpening was one of the first things I noticed. Instead of seeking out and crunching up every crumb of detail it can find, Indigo's processing lets details fade gracefully into the background. I especially like how Indigo handles high-contrast scenes indoors. White balance is slightly warmer than the standard iPhone look, and Indigo lets shadows be shadows, where the iPhone prefers to brighten them up. It's a whole mood, and I love it. High-contrast scenes outdoors tend toward a brighter, flat exposure, but the RAW files offer a ton of latitude for bringing back contrast and pumping up the shadows. I don't usually bother shooting RAW on a smartphone, but Indigo has me rethinking that. Whether you're shooting RAW or JPEG, Indigo (and the iPhone camera, for that matter) produces HDR photos — not to be confused with a flat, HDR-ish image. I mean the real HDR image formats that iOS and Android now support, using a gain map to pop the highlights with a little extra brightness. Since Indigo isn't applying as much brightening to your photo, those highlights pop in a pleasant way that doesn't feel eye-searingly bright as it sometimes can using the standard camera app. This is a camera built for an era of HDR displays and I'm here for it. According to the blog post, Indigo captures and merges more frames for each image than the standard camera app. That's all pretty processor-intensive, and it doesn't take much use to trigger a warning in the app that your phone is overheating. Processing takes more time and is a real battery killer, so bring a battery pack on your shoots. It all makes me appreciate the job the native iPhone camera app has to do even more. It's the most popular camera in the world, and it has to be all things to all people all at once. It has to be fast and battery-efficient. It has to work just as well on this year's model, last year's model, and a phone from seven years ago. If it crashes at the wrong time and misses a once-in-a-lifetime moment, or underexposes your great-uncle Theodore's face in the family photo, the consequences are significant. There are only so many liberties Apple and other phone camera makers can take in the name of aesthetics. To that end, the iPhone 16 series includes revamped Photographic Styles, allowing you to basically fine-tune the tone map it applies to your images to tweak contrast, warmth, or brightness. It doesn't offer the flexibility of RAW shooting — and you can't use it alongside Apple's RAW format — but it's a good starting point if you think your iPhone photos look too flat. There are only so many liberties Apple and any other phone camera maker can take in the name of aesthetics Between Photographic Styles and ProRAW, you can get results from the native camera app that look very similar to Project Indigo's output. But you have to work for it; those options are intentionally out of reach in the main camera app and abstracted away. ProRAW files still look a little crunchier than Indigo's DNGs, even when I take them into Lightroom and turn sharpening all the way down. Both Indigo's DNGs and ProRAW files include a color profile to act as a starting point for edits; I usually preferred Indigo's warmer, slightly darker image treatment. It takes a little more futzing with the sliders to get a ProRAW image where I like it. Project Indigo invites you into the usually mysterious process of taking a photo with a phone camera. It's not an app for everyone, but if that description sounds intriguing, then you're my kind of camera nerd. Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
WIRED
7 days ago
- WIRED
Gear News This Week: Adobe Wants to Make iPhone Photos Better, and TCL Brings Flexibility to Atmos
Plus: JLab's latest Bluetooth speakers start at $20, Wyze tries to make amends with new security upgrades, and more. Courtesy of Philips; JLab All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. The brains behind the computational photography that vaulted Google's Pixel phone camera to fame have a new camera app for you to try, this time from Adobe. Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz left Google several years ago, and Adobe's Project Indigo seems to be the fruit of their labor. The iPhone-only app is available on the App Store for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, plus iPhone 14 and newer. (It's free and doesn't require an Adobe account.) Like the computational photography techniques pioneered with the Pixel's camera, the Project Indigo camera app captures a burst of photos and combines them to deliver better dynamic range with low noise. The research paper written by Kainz and Levoy claims it produces a more natural 'SLR-like' look, closer to that of a professional camera than a smartphone. It does this by underexposing the image while combining up to 32 frames, much more than most phones. This supposedly creates a delay after pressing the shutter button, but that's the sacrifice to get better image quality. The app has manual controls, including shutter speed and ISO, and can capture photos in RAW and JPEG. Adobe's products are already the default for many creatives in post-production workflows, but if the company can craft a camera app that can produce better results than the native camera in smartphones, that could put one's entire workflow through Adobe's ecosystem. The app is still experimental, and the team is hoping to add more features, like Portrait mode, an Android app, and video recording. Wyze Tightens Security With VerifiedView We were big fans of Wyze's budget security camera wares, but those low, low prices came at a cost. We stopped testing and recommending Wyze cameras in early 2024 after a series of security incidents. (The final straw was the exposure of 13,000 camera feeds to customers who didn't own them.) The company has been working hard to beef up its security since then and win back customer trust. The latest announcement to that end is VerifiedView, which tags all your videos with your unique user ID. Before anyone can view, download, or share that content, Wyze verifies that the user ID on the content matches the account that's trying to access it. In short, it's a fail-safe to prevent anyone from being able to watch videos from other people's cameras, and it should make a recurrence of that last breach impossible. Over the last few months, Wyze has pulled in security consultants for extensive penetration testing, improved password requirements, enabled two-factor authentication by default, improved cloud security, beefed up encryption, and rolled out tools to detect suspicious logins. Wyze cofounder Dave Crosby told WIRED that Wyze has also reduced its reliance on third-party tools, which were partly to blame for that last breach. The company now has a bug bounty program and a transparent reporting policy, plus Crosby says every employee has completed cybersecurity training. It's a shame it took a serious breach for this to happen, but these actions are encouraging, and the company has managed to stay incident-free for almost 18 months now. We plan to resume testing Wyze devices soon. — Simon Hill Peak Design Finally Refreshes Its Travel Tripod I've been regularly using Peak Design's Travel Tripod for 5 years, so I'm excited to see the company finally debuting a successor: the Pro Tripod. It's now on Kickstarter with an expected October ship date. The Pro Tripod comes in various versions: Pro Lite ($800), Pro ($900), and Pro Tall ($1,000). They all can hold 40 pounds (as opposed to 20), are taller, and remain travel-friendly and portable. It was difficult to shoot video with the original Travel Tripod, but that's remedied with the Pro Tripod's fluid panning capability via the redesigned Pro Ball Head. There's a separate Tilt Mod you can add for full pan and tilt functionality. The differences between the new tripods aren't vast. The Pro Lite shaves some weight (it's 3.7 pounds) but doesn't get as stiff; the Pro Tall has a higher deploy height and can be stiffer, but is heavier and larger (4.5 pounds). The Pro blends a bit of both (4.2 pounds). The tripods have carbon fiber legs with a CNC-machined anodized aluminum center hub. They look like great upgrades all-around, only if you can stomach the leap in price. JLab's New Bluetooth Speakers Are Crazy Cheap JLab is taking its talents for crafting quality earbuds at shockingly low prices into the portable speaker market with four new budget Bluetooth models. The lineup starts with the $20 Pop Party Speaker, a hangable oval with dual two-inch drivers, dual passive radiators, customizable RGB lighting via the JLab app, and around eight hours of battery life. Stepping up to the $30 Go Party Speaker gets you slightly improved water resistance (IPX6 vs IPX5) and twice the battery life in a tubular design reminiscent of JBL's Flip speakers. The larger JBuds Party ($70) offers 30 watts of power to make it 'one of the most powerful speakers at its price,' according to JLab, though, unlike most speakers at this level, it's not fully dunkable, offering just IPX6 water resistance. Finally, because every brand needs a karaoke speaker, there's the $150 Epic Party with a 360-degree soundstage, four 2.5-inch drivers, a 5.25-inch woofer, and up to 16 hours of claimed battery life. Like its siblings, the Epic boasts RGB lighting and includes both a 3.5-mm aux connection and a quarter-inch jack for adding a microphone. All four speakers are available this week, and we'll be checking them out soon to see how they stack up to the best Bluetooth speakers we've tested. — Ryan Waniata TCL Z100 Speaker Makes Atmos Sound More Flexible More than 18 months after it was first teased at IFA 2023, TCL has confirmed the launch of the Z100—the world's first Dolby Atmos FlexConnect speaker. The aim here is to deliver Atmos sound wirelessly and flexibly, with a range of configurations available—from two to four speakers. As they are wireless, the Z100 speakers can be placed wherever is convenient in the room, and will work along with the sound from compatible TCL TVs as well as any other Z100s you own, creating a 5.1.2-channel or 7.1.4-channel Atmos sound. Each speaker packs four drivers, including one upwards firing, to deliver 170 watts of total power. The Z100 is currently compatible with the latest generation of TCL QD-Mini LED TVs, like the QM6K, and will also double up as a Bluetooth speaker (without Atmos). It'll be available first in France starting July 2025, with further European and US launches to follow. — Verity Burns Philips Hue Debuts the Wall Washer The latest smart lighting release from Philips Hue is the Hue Play Wall Washer. This sleek, black, aluminum device is just 6 inches tall and is designed to sit on your TV cabinet or sideboard and, as the name suggests, wash your wall in colorful light. Employing a new ColorCast projection technology, the Wall Washer sprays light at a wide angle and supports multiple simultaneous colors and a ton of lighting effects. You can sync it with your existing Hue lights and systems, including the Hue HDMI Sync box and the TV and PC Sync apps. Folks can set the intensity, speed, brightness, 3D positioning, and direction of the light it emits in the Hue app. Available this month, a single wall washer costs a rather spicy $220, or you can snag a two-pack for $385. Select markets already have access to the built-in AI assistant in the Hue app, which you can ask to generate scenes based on your mood or activity, but it's rolling out to the UK in July and globally (including the US) in August. — Simon Hill
Android Authority
18-06-2025
- Android Authority
Indigo is a new camera app by the guys who made the Pixel and Google Camera apps
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority TL;DR Adobe has launched the Indigo camera app on the Apple App Store. Two of the influential minds behind the Google and Pixel Camera apps are also working on Indigo. The team says they're planning an Android version of the app, but there's no word on a release window. The Pixel Camera app (formerly Google Camera) is perhaps the most influential smartphone camera app ever made. That was in large part due to the HDR+ processing and Super Res Zoom for improved hybrid zoom. Now, two of the brains behind the Pixel Camera app have launched a spiritual successor of sorts. Adobe recently launched the Indigo camera app on the iPhone's App Store, and it seems to build on the foundation of the Pixel Camera app. It's no coincidence as two of the creators, Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, previously worked on the Google Camera and Pixel Camera apps. The duo penned a blog post describing Indigo as a computational photography camera app that provides great image quality, a more natural look, and full manual controls. Indigo picks up where the Pixel Camera left off Indigo follows Google's original HDR+ approach by combining a series of deliberately under-exposed images for each shot you take. However, Adobe's app differs by combining up to 32 images at once versus Google's 15 images. The team says it also under-exposes these images 'more strongly' than most other solutions. 'This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows,' Levoy and Kainz explained. 'Taking a photo with our app may require slightly more patience after pressing the shutter button than you're used to, but after a few seconds you'll be rewarded with a better picture.' Adobe also posted two images (seen below) comparing a single frame captured by the iPhone to Indigo's multi-frame picture. The latter image unsurprisingly shows greatly reduced noise compared to the single-frame shot. Single frame output Multi-frame output Adobe explains that this approach also means less denoising (i.e., smoothing) is needed for images. In fact, the app leans towards minimal smoothing in order to preserve natural textures, even if this means there's some noise in the picture. This multi-frame approach with reduced denoising also applies to RAW images. Another Pixel Camera feature that's made its way to Indigo is Super Res Zoom. Google introduced this feature with the Pixel 3 series, combining multiple frames, your natural hand shake, and super-resolution to deliver improved hybrid zoom. Google also combined Super Res Zoom and image cropping from 1x and 5x cameras to deliver higher quality 2x and 10x shots. And Indigo offers pretty much the same approach on iPhone Pro Max models, enabling improved 2x and 10x images. In fact, the 2x and 10x zoom buttons have little 'SR' icons to denote super-resolution zoom. How else does Indigo stand out from other camera apps? Adobe said Indigo offers a more natural look by avoiding strong tone mapping, aggressive smoothing, and over-sharpening. We've also seen most brands use semantic segmentation (e.g., object/subject detection) to make major adjustments, but Adobe claims that Indigo only makes subtle tweaks. The Indigo camera app also offers a night mode, which combines up to 32 one-second-long images into one picture when a tripod is detected. However, the night mode still supports handheld photography, as you might expect. This behavior is in line with several other OEM camera apps, which can automatically detect a tripod and offer longer exposures. Other notable features include zero shutter lag, pro controls (ISO, shutter speed, exposure, white balance), and a long exposure mode that supports RAW output. In fact, Indigo also lets users set the number of captured frames to be combined into an image. The latter could be useful if you need to capture a fast-moving subject. Indigo app availability: What about Android? Adobe has released Indigo on the App Store, and it looks like you need an iPhone with at least 6GB of RAM: The app runs on all Pro and Pro Max iPhones starting from series 12, and on all non-Pro iPhones starting from series 14. The company also confirmed that an Android version of the app is in the pipeline, but it didn't reveal any more details. Other features on the way include alternative looks, a high-quality portrait mode, a video mode (with 'cool computational video' features), and a panorama option. Adobe said it's also considering several bracketing options (exposure, focus, etc), with the camera app combining these bracketed shots. The company says these options could be handy for astrophotography or a shot that's completely in focus. In any event, I'm glad to see two of the minds behind the modern Pixel Camera experience working on such a robust camera app. So our fingers are crossed that the app comes to Android sooner rather than later. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at news@ . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
