Adobe Project Indigo Camera App

[John A.]

Adobe recently released its Project Indigo camera app for iPhones (see link below). The app creates what appear to be multi-frame, computationally-merged, DNG RAW files. They are NOT demosaiced like Apple ProRaw files (linear DNGs). In Lightroom mobile the Project Indigo DNGs open with an Indigo embedded profile that looks pretty good I have to say. Do you have any advice on how best to edit these files in Nitro? In Nitro, I’ve tried turning off tone mapping in Tone and hitting auto in Curves, and that seems to be an OK starting point, but I’m guessing there’s better. Thanks.

https://research.adobe.com/articles/indigo/indigo.html

[Nik Bhatt]

Thanks for sending this information. I installed the app (though I was aggravated by the requirement to capture location + photo library access, neither of which are actually required for this app).

I see that the RAW images get the tone map slider, which is confusing since Adobe says that the images are “RAW”. I don’t know if that’s just marketing or if they are writing the file in a way that makes Apple’s decoder provide the Tone Map slider. The fact that the slider works, would indicate the former (just marketing), since if there isn’t a tone map, the slider won’t do anything. (As an aside, Adobe also claims that DNGs are RAW which is objectively false. Some DNGs are RAW and some are linearized images. Linearized DNGs are basically fancy TIFFs).

I agree that moving Tone Map to zero is the best way to start with such images.

[John A.]

Thanks, Nik – just a quick follow-up question. Does Nitro make use of the embedded Indigo profile? The profile makes a huge difference in LR mobile. John

[Author]

Posts