Adobe has released a camera app called Project Indigo that makes smartphone cameras more “SLR-like,” with “full manual controls, a more natural look and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide — in both JPEG and raw formats.” The Project Indigo app is available free, for now, on iOS from Adobe Labs, which quietly announced the product on its research website. The app aims to leverage a decade’s worth of advances in computational photography to help mobile photographers improve low-light and high dynamic range (HDR) image capture.

Project Indigo takes a similar approach to HDR as Adobe’s Adaptive Color Profile, making it compatible with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop plugin Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). That said, the app knows “which camera, exposure time, and ISO was used when capturing your photo, so our look can be more faithful than Adobe’s profile” to the technical specs of the scene captured, Adobe writes in the research post.

“Many modern smartphones, like the iPhone 15/16 Pro and Pro Max models, feature several high-quality rear cameras with different focal lengths,” explains PetaPixel. “Across various focal length options, however, phones utilize digital crops, meaning they just use less of the image sensor and then, in some cases, digitally scale the images to be larger. In Project Indigo, when the user pinches to zoom, the app uses multi-frame super-resolution, which promises to ‘restore much of the image quality lost by digital scaling.'”

The approach is similar to pixel-shift mode on a DSLR camera, “taking advantage of natural hand movement to capture the same scene from a series of slightly different perspectives, the app then combines these different frames into one larger, sharper one that features more detail than a single photo,” PetaPixel writes, adding that “unlike AI-based super-resolution, the extra detail is real.”

Engadget reports that Project Indigo combines computational photography techniques “with pro controls and new AI-powered features.” The app advances some of the techniques engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz developed when working on the Pixel phone at Google (the two are now respectively a fellow and research scientist at Adobe).

Project Indigo offers “controls over focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance” as would be found on a dedicated camera, PetaPixel writes.

Sample images can be viewed at Adobe’s Project Indigo Lightroom album. Adobe recommends using an HDR-compatible display with Google Chrome.

Adobe says user feedback is sought and hints that a paid commercial product will be available in the future, as will an Android version.

Related:
Adobe Launches a New ‘Computational Photography’ Camera App for iPhones, The Verge, 6/19/25