A single-image photo taken by an iPhone under 1/10 lux illumination, which is so dark that it is hard to even see a few feet away. Project Indigo’s photo of the same scene using its Night mode. This mode captures and merges 32 exposures captured in just a few seconds. “What’s different about computational photography using Indigo? First, we under-expose more strongly than most cameras,” the researchers write. “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.” Project Indigo Promises a Natural Look to Your Photos As for the “look” of smartphone photos that many photographers dislike — something that — many mobile camera apps use computational photography to excess. While high-dynamic range photos with clever tone mapping can expand the dynamic range that mobile shooters can capture, they can also result in distorted, unnatural-looking images. Adobe has already made considerable strides in the realm of more natural-looking HDR photos with its , which uses subtle semantically-aware mask-based adjustments to expand tonal range without making photos look weird. Project Indigo builds upon this work but can achieve even better results because, as a camera app itself, it can work alongside the specific camera settings in real-time. “Our look is similar to Adobe’s Adaptive Color profile, making our camera app naturally compatible with Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. That said, we know 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 brightness of the scene before you,” Adobe writes. While Adobe has provided many Project Indigo sample photos that can be properly displayed on this article, many more are best viewed in HDR. To view these photos, visit . Adobe recommends viewing this album on an HDR-compatible display using Google Chrome, but it will work in some other browsers. Adobe notes that the album may not display correctly in Safari, however. , Welcome to Project Indigo, a new camera experience from Adobe Labs. With a custom computational photography pipeline, a natural image look, and full set of manual camera controls, it offers something for professional and casual photographers alike. In addition, we introduce new controls for computat…, As Adobe explores ways to evolve mobile photography, and in order to address some of these gaps, we have developed a camera app we call Project Indigo. Today, we are releasing this for iPhone as a free mobile app from Adobe Labs, available in the Apple App Store - to share our progress and get feedback from the community..