Adobe Project Indigo is a new photo app from former Pixel camera engineers

https://www.engadget.com/apps/adobe-project-indigo-is-a-new-photo-app-from-former-pixel-camera-engineers-213453207.html

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

83 84 1 year ago

For those interested in this, Leica LUX is the alternative iOS Camera. It also works for those who cannot afford to own a Leica.

https://leica-camera.com/en-SG/photography/leica-apps/leica-...

raylad• 1 year ago

I just tried it and the Leica Chrome setting looked better to me than anything the normal camera app or Project Indigo produced.

But I hate subscription apps. And the rest of the UI seems quite clumsy.

Melatonic6• 1 year ago

You could probably shoot in apple raw with the built in app and then find a free Lightroom preset (I think Lightroom mobile can have custom presets uploaded to it) and get better results.

Lightroom mobile also actually might require a subscription to edit raw files however (then again it can do a lot more for the price). It also has a free version and you might have good results shooting in a high quality .heif

mrtksn4• 1 year ago

Wow I love that. The processing looks like a Leica indeed, the UI has a Leica feel and put me in a mood for candid Leica style photos haha :)

When using a DSLR I almost always shoot in (A)perture mode, it helps you control how much you separate the subject from the background and it's the thing I miss the most on phone. The portrait mode isn't quite the same.

It's the first app that I came across to have an aperture mode, cool.

PS: Apparently it lets you capture in all modes, but to edit the parameters after taking the picture it requires the pro mode.

Melatonic6• 1 year ago

I don't think phones have adjustable apertures actually on their mobile cameras. That being said each camera will have a different aperture and you can exploit this to get real DSLR like bokeh (blurred backgrounds).

Basically you want to make sure probably to use real focal lengths (disable digital zoom). This applies to all iPhones and androids.

Usually the main (normal) focal length camera will have the largest sensor and best aperture. Have the phone focus on something close and find the closest distance the phone can manage. This will create the biggest background blur.

On phones with longer length telephoto this will often also work if you find the closest focus point and do the same process. Depending on the actual focal length to sensor size ratio (and aperture) of the telephoto lens it may either have more or less blur than the main camera.

The Ultrawide will usually never have much background blur ability but that is generally true for a real DSLR as well

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

Cheaper than a Leica, but still really damn expensive for a camera app.

al_borland• 1 year ago

And if you want the shutter button accessory they advertise, that’s $395 (but sold out currently). That’s a lot of money for a MagSafe button. A person could get an entry level DSLR from Canon for about the same price.

average_r_user• 1 year ago

I really love this app, but I'm not a fan of the subscription model. While I understand the business reasoning, I'd much prefer having the option to purchase individual presets instead of committing to a full subscription.

I recently used the B/W preset by Greg Williams during my trip to Iceland, and the results were fantastic. The grainy texture it added to my photos was exactly what I was looking for and really enhanced the dramatic Icelandic landscapes.

stlava• 1 year ago

I’m impressed they managed to make an app that makes me not want to use it or my phone to take photos! After I used it for about 5 mins I resolved to dust off my older DSLR and use it instead.

Springtime3• 1 year ago

The article's wording suggests this supports computational RAW which would be useful. That is, auto stacking multiple captures into a single RAW (a la Google Camera for Pixel phones), rather than the traditional single capture. Allowing for reduced noise and higher dynamic range.

It's interesting as when I last looked a couple years ago only Fujifilm had a mirrorless digital camera (with cropped sensor) that supported this on-device.

DidYaWipe4• 1 year ago

It's just "raw."

Springtime3• 1 year ago

Every instance I've seen it referred to has used the RAW capitalization, including Google's PR, as it's an image format.

vr46• 1 year ago

Indigo is excellent so far, a little bit buggy, but I am seriously impressed. (iPhone 12 Pro)

And I have a Q2, a 5D4 and a 645Z, this little app is really great, and colour me surprised.

bix6• 1 year ago

Is this an actual SLR replacement / anyone know the RAW size and print size at 300dpi?

Last time I sent iPhone photos into my print shop they kicked them back.

tlhunter• 1 year ago

Is this an actual SLR replacement

There's just no way to replace the massive 35mm sensor of a larger DSLR / mirrorless camera. The amount of light gathered can only be simulated by capturing many frames. True depth of field can only be emulated by imperfectly blurring estimated background area via software, leading to goofy blurred hairs. Even the reported megapixels of a smartphone contain a quarter or less the equivalent DSLR resolution detail (a 24MP smartphone photo is roughly equivalent to the detail of a 6MP DSLR photo).

josephg4• 1 year ago

Yep this. I’ve been getting into photography over the last 9 months or so. I got a Sony a7iv and an increasing pile of lenses for it. It’s making me a huge camera snob. The truth is that nothing a phone can do can come close to the image quality of a proper modern camera. You can spot the difference a mile off. Photos from phones look like they’ve been passed through stable diffusion or something. They just look wrong in comparison to a real camera with real lenses and real lights.

It shouldn’t be surprising. Real depth of field is physically impossible with a small lens. And cameras have teeny tiny lenses and sensors. It’s impressive how good the photos are given the hardware, but the hardware is very very bad in comparison to a dedicated camera with replaceable lenses.

DidYaWipe4• 1 year ago

Software can't turn a phone into an SLR. It's an asinine claim.

It's not that the application can't bring value to the platform, but they need to better convey what it is. "Making images that look like they're from an SLR" smacks of fakery.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

Software can't turn a phone into an SLR.

Not yet — but not never...

thedougd• 1 year ago

This is the first app I’ve ever downloaded for it to tell me my phone isn’t supported.

yumraj• 1 year ago

Same experience on SE3.

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised they did a hardware check within the app rather than just restrict the app on the iOS app store side. Surely they should've marked your phone incompatible before you wasted your time downloading the app?

I do wonder what makes older phones incompatible, though. Others are complaining about the performance, so it could be that the low amounts of RAM Apple puts in their phones is starting to catch up, or it could be as simple as them not having trained their AI models for some older phones yet.

modeless• 1 year ago

Marc Levoy is an "engineer"? Sure, but maybe more relevant is the fact that he's a well-known computer graphics researcher and professor emeritus at Stanford.

danjl• 1 year ago

And Florian is an ILM OG who wrote some of their most amazing tools.

jrgaston• 1 year ago

It's not a dslr replacement, what a weird claim. My Nikons and Fujis are so much nicer to hold, to adjust, to shoot. But for a phone camera the s.w is ok. More adjustable than the iPhone app. I like the controls, the current settings text, and built in help text.

Only knock so far is it runs hot: never seen an overheating warning ever on my iPhone 14pro. Now i get one every ten or fifteen minutes when using Indigo.

mrtksn4• 1 year ago

This is the first time my iPhone 14 Pro felt inadequate.

The app is so heavy that the phone is overheating after the first photo. it consumes so much resources that’s the music was playing in the background stopped because my AirPods connection dropped. For the very first time on this phone I felt like I need an upgrade, it felt like the last days of my iPhone 6s. I didn’t know you can do that to an iPhone.

The photo quality is supperb though, obviously not DSLR replacement but it really gives you that feel. Apple’s own processing has become too boring, sometimes I use Halide just to have unprocessed raws.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

The app is so heavy that the phone is overheating after the first photo.

I have the same phone and no overheating errors here.

Do you mean the phone got slightly warm? That’s not overheating, it’s just what happens when you use an app that leverage the CPU for anything non-trivial. It’s not overheating.

EDIT: The screenshot below clarifies that the heat warning is a message in the app, not the actual iOS overheating protection as ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/118431 ). Regardless, I still can’t trigger the in-app temperature warning on my phone.

mrtksn4• 1 year ago

It's literally the app complaining about it: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/b191e7b8-8dad-4fed-...

It will dim the screen soon, so much that it's unusable outdoors. I wasn't able to capture a photo outdoors yesterday using this app because of this. The first photo slowly finished processing but the app crashed, lost the photo. Then the device was overheating, the screen dimmed to unusable and the FPS dropped, the app become unresponsive and the music went away, the AirPods re-connected. Couldn't even try to capture a second one.

It wasn't even that hot, just 28C.

leptons4• 1 year ago

For the very first time on this phone I felt like I need an upgrade, it felt like the last days of my iPhone 6s. I didn’t know you can do that to an iPhone.

Apple got caught purposely slowing down older model iPhones.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

astrange9• 1 year ago

Because of how aged batteries work, if you don't purposely slow down the phone sometimes it'll shut off, which is worse.

qwopmaster• 1 year ago

Same experience on 14 pro - it got noticeably hot after 2nd photo, and after 3rd the app crashed and OS was choppy for a few minutes. And that was indoors, in 22C and screen fairly dim. Never seen anything like it; as-is I’d avoid the app lest it actually damages something. The photos themselves do look better than apple’s default cam, but not by a huge amount. Most noticeable is better range, like a photo of a blue sky with a few clouds seen through your window that takes up a third of the photo, which by default is either very dim inside or mostly indistinct blue-gray or blown out if focusing inside. Super-resolution however, especially at 6x (double 14 pro’s 3x optical zoom) is actual wizardry.

On the other hand night photos seem like garbage - there’s a bit more stuff visible than on default 3sec night mode but the colors are nonsensical and details nonexistent, certainly nothing even remotely close to what adobe promises on their webpage.

All in all I’m not sure what use it is with the terrible performance, outside of long-range photos that you really want to shoot at 6x zoom and keep as much detail as possible.

pantulis• 1 year ago

Another datapoint with an 15 Pro Max. I shot a couple of pics indoors in my own room and got the message. Seems the app is continuosly processing what's coming from the sensor.

vachina• 1 year ago

Par for the course for an Adobe app. Bloated, slow and meh output.

fortyseven• 1 year ago

Weird how "superb" was misspelled as "meh" here.

Melatonic6• 1 year ago

Agreed on some points but when used properly adobe apps usually have quite good output. There's a reason Photoshop has been the industry standard for so long.

coolandsmartrr• 1 year ago

Strange, they don't let you download this app from the App Store in Japan.

preek• 1 year ago

After the first shot on my iPhone 13 Pro in default settings, it immediately told me my phone was overheating and going to be unstable. Then it crashed. I tried once more, turned off raw mode, waited _minutes_ for one image to process and now my screen turns off and on again randomly while I type this comment.

Jotalea2• 1 year ago

I expected worse from Adobe.

neya2• 1 year ago

Who cares, it's Adobe. They'll eventually steal your work under some under-the-hood TOS update and even charge you for it. Don't believe me? Ask the existing CS customers. Fuck Adobe. They should be boycotted to oblivion.

mesh• 1 year ago

4.2 Ownership
As between you and Adobe, you (as a Business User or a Personal User, as applicable) retain all rights and ownership of your Content. We do not claim any ownership rights to your Content.

https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

neya2• 1 year ago

I guess you missed the recent fiasco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxg5LzFw-_g&t=33s

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/06/06/clarification-a...

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

Runs on my iPhone 15, but not well. Phone heats up like crazy and processing photos takes a while.

The end result is almost the same as the pictures the normal camera app takes. I think I must be missing something because this looks like a worse re-implementation of the normal camera app to me. Maybe I need to take the app out at dusk to take some pictures in more challenging conditions?

I still prefer the photos from my Pixel over the photos from my work iPhone.

dwayne_dibley• 1 year ago

I know this is ranty, but I really miss internet sites that aren't 60% adverts, 30% padding and 10% actual thing. This isn't anything more than an announcement page.

arresin• 1 year ago

Adobe

Not interested.

0manrho• 1 year ago

My sentiment exactly. Unless it's FOSS for some reason, anything Adobe - especially if it's work/income related - is a hard pass.

Jotalea2• 1 year ago

I see many users reporting overheating, incompatibility, and lag on 1 or 2 year old devices by using this app, which is ridiculous. If a flagship phone released this recently cannot handle an app like this, the problem might not be the phone, but rather the app itself. I simply cannot believe they (adobe) screwed up this bad, but I hope they will fix it before I get to try the app by myself. I do not want a broken expensive device.

Melatonic6• 1 year ago

If you want something lighter weight with manual controls and a much longer history I highly recommend the iOS app "Camera M".

Unfortunately Apple restricts some control of the hardware only to the official iOS camera app so in some cases you are actually best off tweaking the built in app as much as possible. I believe Camera M actually has some details about this on their support page and FAQ.

One time fee - often updated - no subscription. The UI isn't fancy but it does everything well and I've found their email support responds quickly and enthusiastically.

Adobe Project Indigo is a new photo app from former Pixel camera engineers

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