On recent walks along our local beach I have been experimenting more with my iPhone 16 and the new Adobe app called ‘Project Indigo’. Normally I use an app called ‘Pro Camera’ on my phone which has given me great results.
The advantage of the iPhone 16 is that it can capture RAW image files that can be taken into my Lightroom catalogue and then into Photoshop for editing in the same workflow that I use for images from my camera.
Both these apps enhance the images being made by the phone camera through the clever use of software but are quite different to use, leaving me wondering which to use as my default phone camera setup.
With ‘Pro Camera’, I love the ease of zooming between wide angle and a x5 zoom as well as the simple way I can alter the aspect ratio of the image, something that makes a huge impact on how these phone images work for me.
It’s also easy to change the shutter speed and the ISO setting and the point of focus is also very straightforward to select.
‘Pro Camera’ saves the images into a folder called Lightbox from where it is easy to select a bunch of images and transfer then onto my laptop using the Mac’s ‘Airdrop’ system of file transfer. The files I get are in the TIFF format and in a range of file sizes from 6mb up to 20mb.
Adobe’s Project Indigo is a much more recent addition to my phone and I have less experience using it. However, the images it creates seem exceptionally clean and detailed. The zoom function is amazing with a wide angle to 10x zoom able to be selected from the main view screen. The adjustments are less intuitive and are selected using a secondary control panel at the bottom of the screen. There you can manually select focus, the shutter speed and ISO setting. Interestingly, you can also manually select the colour temperature and the colour tint of the image you are taking.
Project Indigo or PI, saves the images as JPEG or DNG files into the normal IOS photo storage on the iPhone. From there they can also be selected and transferred onto the laptop using the Airdrop system and the files tend to be smaller, around 2mb to 10mb.
I’m going to experiment with PI’s long exposure and multiple image functions by using a lightweight travel tripod on which I’ve fixed a phone mount. It will be interesting to see the quality of images created and if this combination would prove to be an alternative to the DSLR and heavy tripod as I get even older and more decrepit and less willing to hump heavy camera equipment around!
