Adobe’s New Experimental App Seeks to Enhance Mobile Photography Experience
Adobe has launched a new initiative aimed at enhancing smartphone photography, particularly through the development of a new app called Project Indigo. This project, spearheaded by Adobe Fellow Marc Levoy and Senior Scientist Florian Kainz, seeks to provide smartphone photos with a more natural, SLR-like aesthetic while prioritizing high image quality.
In their recent research paper, Levoy and Kainz elaborate on the methodologies employed in the Project Indigo app. One of the key strategies involves stronger under-exposure compared to conventional camera apps.
The app captures, aligns, and aggregates as many as 32 frames when producing a single photo. This technique results in images with fewer blown-out highlights and reduced shadow noise.
While this means that users may need to exercise a bit more patience when taking photos, the eventual payoff is a higher quality image. Project Indigo also addresses common issues encountered with smartphone cameras, such as over-smoothing and the limitations of global tone mapping.
Traditional smartphone photography often results in underexposed areas due to adjustments made for the brightest point in the image. The Indigo app preserves more natural textures and enhances the overall picture quality, making post-processing easier, especially when not using RAW format.
Additionally, Project Indigo tackles the shortcomings of digital zooming by employing a multi-frame super-resolution technique. This involves capturing multiple images at varying resolutions, which are then combined to create a single photo with enhanced detail.
The app also provides users with extensive control over camera settings like focus and shutter speed, tailored specifically for mobile photography. Looking forward, the developers envision a feature where photographers could preview real-time adjustments in the viewfinder, enhancing the shooting experience.
Project Indigo is positioned as a precursor to future technologies that could be integrated into Adobe’s flagship products, such as Lightroom. The app is currently available for free in the App Store.