If you have never looked beyond the default camera application of your phone, it is worth doing it. The Apple App Store and the Google Play Store have dozens of decent alternatives, offering you different interfaces and features to capture photos and videos.
The latest arrival in this category is Project Indigo, which is now available for iOS (an Android version is apparently on the way). This is notable because it comes from Adobe, and some developers were previously involved in the default camera application on Google Pixel phones.
The application also brings interesting ideas on what mobile photography should be and how the computation power of telephone applications can be used to produce images that are better and more natural than ever. Try it and you can find that you start using it much more than the default option.
How the indigo project works
The developers behind Project Indigo wrote a detailed test on the application of the camera and its intentions. The application is designed to improve the quality of the mobile photo as a whole, to approach the “unrealistic” look of many images captured on a phone (with too much brightness and not enough contrast), and to offer more manual control on the capture process.
Project Indigo is what is called a calculation photography application, which essentially means that an artificial treatment is applied to extend what is possible with the images, beyond the information that can really be entered via the camera lens. Certain intelligent mathematics and algorithms are applied, a bit like filters in a photo retouching program.
With Project Indigo, this means that up to 32 different images are captured each time you press the trigger, with a tendency to underexposure – leaving less light in the image, in order to reduce the crushing (where the details are lost). These frames are then intelligently combined to produce a global image which should be natural and well balanced, including details in the lightest and darkest parts of the frame.
To help in natural realism, Project Indigo avoids a large part of the conventional adjustments usually applied by phones: increasing brightness and saturation, sharp edges and smoothing of textures. These changes can burst photos and make them more beautiful on smaller screens, but they reduce the authenticity of an image.
Project Indigo brings less of these changes and applies them more subtlely, so the end result is something closer to what you could get from a DSLR digital camera. The changes are automatically adjusted according to the subject of an image and its quality, and the photos can be published in the JPEG and RAW formats for more control.
You also get a multitude of manual commands with this camera application, so you can adjust the development, shutter speed, ISO, exposure and white balance. You can even define the number of frames (up to 32 by default) that the Indigo project captures in a single burst and uses a special long -term exposure button to blur fast travel objects.
How to use Project Indigo
Download and launch the Indigo project from the iOS App Store, and your first task will be to make your way through all the authorizations the application needs to take control of your camera. There is also a practical tutorial page presenting the different features of the application – it appears just at the beginning, but you can find it at any time by sliding on the left on the histogram at the top, then tapping the speed icon and choosing Camera characteristics.
The default capture interface that you will first see has two modes to choose from: Photo And Night. You can switch to each other using the buttons by the main circular shutter button, or via the button in the upper right corner (which will show a camera or a moon crescent) – in night mode, the exposure time is longer to grasp as light as possible, and you will have to keep the camera as motionless as possible.
In the upper left corner, you can switch between JPEG JPEG images capture, or JPEG images with raw images (DNG). At the top, there is a histogram showing the current brightness levels of the frame in the shooting, and you can slide on the left to access a selection of key tools, including the timer of the camera and the superposition of the grid.
At the bottom of the capture window, you have buttons to adjust the zoom and to switch between the front and rear cameras. Project Indigo can apply smart calculation tips to zoom in without losing quality. Press the button with two cursors (bottom right) and you can access manual pro controls in the application.
These commands take the form of four or five more buttons depending on the mode, which you can press to select and configure (and access the features such as long exposure) – you will also see that you will also get more information on what is currently in the shooting at the top of the screen, including the shutter speed and the ISO. The icon in the upper left corner of the frame shows you how stable your phone (and the more stable there is, the better, especially for night photos).
Use the sliders that appear on the screen to make the necessary adjustments to values ​​such as exposure and balance of whites, and the modifications are previewed in real time – you can also press the SLIDERS button again (bottom right) to reset these values ​​to their default values. If you need help, come back to the TIPS page via the Settings screen (the COG icon at the top, right of the histogram), which also allows you to configure capture images such as image stabilization.
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