Project Indigo is out. It’s early, definitely beta and very promising…

Mark Levoy and Florian Kainz of Adobe released their 5 year project to provide the next step change in computational photography. It’s a (definitely) beta app for iOS called Project Indigo. Mark Levoy is credited with the computational photography tricks that made Pixel the best smartphone camera thanks to HDR+. The techniques have since arrived in almost all smartphone platforms and personally, I am very surprised that they’ve not been leveraged by camera manufacturers to try and come up with different ways to shoot photos – leveraging cheaper hardware and putting more compute to it.

Anyway, for someone like me who also likes traditional cameras, smartphone cameras never still hit the spot.

Second, people often complain about the “smartphone look” – overly bright, low contrast, high color saturation, strong smoothing, and strong sharpening. To some extent this look is driven by consumer preference. It also makes photos easier to read on the small screen and in bad lighting. But to the discerning photographer, or anybody who views these photos on a larger screen than a phone, they may look unrealistic.

I think this plastic look is what makes me reach out to a regular camera over my incredible smartphone camera. However, it seems like this group is looking to change that

The app offers full manual controls, a more natural (“SLR-like”) look, and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide – in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduces some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps.

So, most smartphone cameras today take around 4-16 images for the following reason:

While this phrase has come to mean many things, in the context of mobile cameras it typically includes two strategies: (1) under-expose slightly to reduce the clipping of highlights, and (2) capture multiple images in rapid succession when you press the shutter button. These images are aligned and combined to reduce noise in the shadows. The laws of physics say that imaging noise (the digital version of film grain) goes down as the square root of the number of images that are added together, so if the camera combines 9 images, noise is reduced by a factor of 3. 

This is the current state of the art only because the smartphone makers are trying to balance – cost, speed and real time nature of the camera. So, you can imagine that if you are willing to wait a bit more and throw more computing resources at it you could generate a better image. Turns out, Project Indigo is certainly starting off with the obvious

What’s different about computational photography using Indigo? First, we under-expose more strongly than most cameras. Second, we capture, align, and combine more frames when producing each photo – up to 32 frames as in the example above. This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows. 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.

This often means that you need less denoising (smoothing) and that means more detail – think more textures in the grass, the wall, face etc leading to a more natural image. This is certainly moving the photo to the right direction. What an SLR image captures in terms of detail in one single shutter click, the smartphone camera is now attempting with 32 frames.

They are also extending the benefits of all this including high dynamic range via the gain-map technique that’s now widely employed in all smartphone platforms. Overall, this is a very promising direction. I can totally imagine Apple actually taking what they’ve developed here and doing it all in hardware to truly provide a step change in smartphone photography. Maybe I am wishcasting here.

The app runs on all Pro and Pro Max iPhones starting from series 12, and on all non-Pro iPhones starting from series 14. (That said, we’ve deliberately designed Indigo to explore the boundary of what is possible on a mobile device, so the app does some pretty heavy computing, and you’ll have a better experience on a newer iPhone.) It requires no Adobe sign-on at present, and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.

The Verge has already taken it out for a spin and they seem impressed.

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.

Let shadows be shadows has long been a request of mine and I am not surprised that I also enjoy the starting shots from Project Indigo. Here’s a picture from earlier today when out kayaking.

If you are okay with your smartphone battery getting killed a bit for better pictures, I highly recommend Project Indigo. It’s not perfect and there are times when it just died without saving pictures – so you know – buyer beware and all that

Project Indigo on the App Store