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I captured this night photo of the Kiggins Theatre, in Vancouver, Washington, during the annual DB Cooper conference. Adobe’s Project Indigo app did a great job of rendering the photo the way I would have expected from a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Photo: Dale Baskin |
Most years, my Gear of the Year shortlist writes itself. There are usually two or three products that clearly stand out, and the hardest part is simply narrowing it down to one.
2025 was different. We’ve seen some great products come through the DPReview office, and I’ve enjoyed using many of them, but none really inspired me in the way I expect to make the cut. In fact, I reached a point last month where I considered not even writing a Gear of the Year column this time around.
And then one day, it hit me. I picked up my iPhone to take a photo, opened Adobe’s Project Indigo app, and… Shazam! I’d been racking my brain trying to think of what hardware I had enjoyed using most this year, and in a moment of mental clarity I wish I could achieve more often, the answer was staring me in the face. Literally, it was in my face as I held the phone up in front of me: the gear I enjoyed using most this year wasn’t a piece of hardware, but an app.
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| Project Indigo is available for free (at least for now) on the iOS App Store. Adobe says it is considering an Android version as well. |
We all know that smartphones can’t compete with large sensor cameras when it comes to ultimate image quality or tactile experience. But they do have this sneaky ability to tag along with us wherever we go, always at the ready.
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Autumn leaves cover the forest floor. Captured with Adobe’s Project Indigo app. Photo: Dale Baskin |
The thing that always frustrates me about smartphone cameras isn’t that they can’t compete with large sensor cameras in terms of image quality – I mean, who would ever expect that they could? – but “the look.” You know exactly what look I’m talking about: that over-processed, over-sharpened look with shadows pushed to within an inch of their life. It’s a signature that screams “smartphone photo.”
This is where Adobe’s Project Indigo comes into the picture. It’s a free product from Adobe Labs that promises “SLR-like” quality from your iPhone. According to Adobe, it accomplishes this using a number of techniques, including underexposing highlights more aggressively and combining more frames (up to 32) than the iPhone’s native camera app. In theory, this should result in fewer blown-out highlights and less noise.
In practice, Project Indigo delivers. To my eye, photos taken with the app usually look more like a well-processed image from a mirrorless camera. The aggressive tone mapping is gone, replaced by images where highlights roll off naturally, and shadows actually look like shadows.
To achieve this, the app uses profiles specifically calibrated for each phone and camera module. That specificity is great, though it can also introduce friction; one of my few frustrations was waiting a few weeks for the Project Indigo team to release an update calibrated for the new iPhone 17 Pro Max I’ve been testing.
“To my eye, photos taken with the app usually look more like a well-processed image from a mirrorless camera.”
The main downside to the Project Indigo app is that all this computational processing requires computational power. The app works on iPhone Pro models as far back as the 12, but it is not a tool for rapid-fire photography as it typically takes 1 to 5 seconds to process a single image (depending on the model). It can also generate some serious heat; my older iPhone 14 Pro gets hot to the touch after just a few photos, and I can practically see the battery indicator get shorter as it works.
The good news is that the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with its newer processor and better thermal management, barely seems to notice the load. It’s frustrating that Project Indigo struggles on older hardware, but I appreciate that this is a proof-of-concept product; Adobe is engineering for the future, not the past.
There are also plenty of tools in the app that I haven’t explored yet, including its own Night Mode, multi-frame super-resolution modes when using sensor-cropped “zoom” (such as the 2x and 8x modes on the iPhone 17 Pro), and AI noise reduction derived from Adobe Camera Raw.
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This photo of a shrub in the forest looks pretty close to what I would expect from a typical mirrorless camera. Photo: Dale Baskin |
If it sounds like I haven’t thoroughly tested Project Indigo, it’s because I haven’t. I’ve been using it for several months, not because I planned to review it, but because I genuinely love the natural-looking photos it produces.
It made me enjoy taking photos with my phone again, and that alone is enough to earn it my Gear of the Year.
Adobe says it’s exploring future directions for Project Indigo, including an Android version, a high-quality portrait mode with more control and higher quality than native apps, and even video recording with computational video features. I’m excited to see where Adobe goes with this, but even if it just stays as it is – a tool that lets me take nicer, more natural photos on the device I already have in my pocket – I’m a fan.
Our DPREVIEW Tribute:
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview closed on 10 April 2023. This difficult decision was part of the annual operating plan review that parent company, Amazon, shared earlier this year.
Over the course of 25 years, DP Review built up a reputation as being one of the most informative places to go for information about that new camera or lens you’re after. DP Review began as an independent reviews site based in the UK in 1998, the brainchild of Philip and Joanna Askey, but it was eventually purchased by Amazon in 2007 and relocated over to Seattle in the USA in 2010.
Cheers DPReview – thanks for the great work and content that guided photographers, videographers and techno junkies the world over!