hey it's Colin here i got something really important I wanted to talk to you about these and these so you might have thought "Oh I'm not into mobile photography i'm out." Hold on a sec do me a favor and listen to the end and see what I've got to say cuz it's not probably what you expect this video is going to tell you everything you need to know about Project Indigo an exciting new camera app that Adobe has released now this video is going to explain how everything works the capabilities and even a lot of real world examples showing comparisons of photos and to keep things simple I've released another video which is just a nononsense user guide that tells you exactly how to use every feature in it but doesn't really go into the explanations all the explanations are in this video so I recommend watching both so yeah we had film cameras we moved to digital digital got better and then the DSLR and then recently for a lot of photographers made the jump into mirrorless cameras uh for me the big reason is video low light higher dynamic range but one thing you don't see much of these days is these the point andoot camera why is that and there's a couple of reasons like these were mainly used by casual photographers who are now using these whether it be an iPhone or it be an Android version let's quickly talk about the advantages of the mobile phone outside of the obvious this small light and you always have them with you i could not hold a dozen mirrorless cameras in my hands at the same time they have larger and brighter screens than any viewfinder on any camera the other advantage is you can edit on exactly the same device you can't really do that for camera so you can take a photo and you can edit it right away and then you have the ability to share a post or whatever you can do everything on one device so the disadvantages of mobile phones is a lack of manual controls the quality usually looks pretty bad it might look all right on the screen but then when you zoom in you see it's soft it's oversharp and it's oversaturated in fact it's overprocessed and thing is just the overall optics when you're looking at bigger glass bigger sensor compared to the small sensor and lens now interestingly enough there are some things like this is a lens for a mobile phone i'll be doing a review on it soon if you're curious about this so here's a quick check-in when's the last time that you really looked at the quality of mobile photography or are you still kind of comparing it to what you saw 10 years ago 15 years ago even a year ago things are changing very quickly so some of you may know some of you may not know i'm an ambassador for Google Pixel no and it's not about that we not talk about that but these are all Google Pixel phones so every time they release a new one they send it to me and I get to test it i get to use it so here's the interesting thing every time I get a new version and by the way this is the Pixel 9 Pro this is the latest one it gets better and better and better but the interesting thing is when I look at the hardware the hardware doesn't change that often even on the iPhone the hardware doesn't change that much so why do they consistently get better and better every year a lot of it has to do with the software and that's what I really want to talk about is computational photography or using software to create better photographs i like to shoot through you know the real camera the big boy the big girl camera right so wherever I'm going you know I don't always have this with me but sometimes I'm on trips and I'm carrying this big lens and I'm carrying this big camera and maybe I'm on a hike and sometimes I decide I want to compromise i'm like you know I don't really want to carry that with me i would rather just carry a phone with me we probably want the phone to shoot as well as it can all right so whether you think big cameras are going to be replaced with phones or whether you think the big cameras are going to shrink down and be a more comfortable form factor something is going to change in the future but let's talk about today adobe has put out a brand new phone app called Project Indigo right now it's in beta you can download it for free it's for the iPhone only it's not on Android at this time so we can download this for free and start using it right now so Project Indigo uses computational photography in fact in some ways it's similar to what the Pixel phones have been doing for a little while but Adobee's got their own spin on it so essentially what it does is it takes a burst of photos up to 30 photos and the reason it does that is it can take all those photos align them and merge them together and drastically reduce the amount of noise in the shadows but also by bracketing or underexposing it can capture all the details in the highlights and so one of the strengths is it has the ability to shoot in RAW so you can shoot in JPEG or you can shoot RAW and JPEG if you want to shoot Pro RAW you have to have the Pro phone using Indigo the last few versions of the iPhone you can be using the nonpro version and still shoot in RAW but even if you are using the Pro version there's some advantages to Indigo that we don't have on the native phone app in fact since I've been testing this I haven't been using the native phone app anymore one of the things it's HDR native so that means when you're taking these photographs by default it's capturing HDR then it's a graceful fallback into SDR okay so so hold on a sec what is HDR hdr is what you see on your phones right now it's if you go to the Instagram app you'll see it if you're in your phone app you'll see it um if you have an HDR TV you'll see it it's where the photos just almost seem to glow you know what I'm talking about because it's it's real HDR so it's not the HDR effect that we were doing you know with Photoshop and Lightroom and processing this is real HDR high dynamic range meaning showing more details in the shadows and the highlights simultaneously so instead of the bright areas blowing out those bright areas have detail they have color in there and and that's why when you look on here and you look at some of the photos which obviously I can't show in this video they just almost seem to glow because they're showing that full dynamic range it's more like a real experience so this is starting to become more common say for example like my monitors I've got BenQ monitors they support HDR um most of the Apple displays now are XDR which is their word for HDR and once you've started looking a few HDR photos you really don't want to go back and look at SDR photos they just look dull in comparison and Adobe's goal with Indigo is to make the photos look more like an SLR and less like a phone so when you look at a phone and it looks good on the screen it's designed to really show up nicely on that little screen but if you look at it on a larger monitor then it starts to fall apart and it doesn't look as good so when you're using Indigo to shoot and maybe you're shooting a RAW and a JPEG this is what happens you shoot the photo it shoots multiple photos it aligns and merges them together and then what it does for the RAW file and it applies a profile to it and this actually uses the adaptive profile that I've talked about before in Camera Raw and Lightroom and then it uses that to apply preliminary adjustments to that RAW file it doesn't bake the settings into the RAW file keeps it as a raw file but uses that profile to give it a really good starting place now the other side is it goes into a JPEG and the adaptive profile if you're familiar with it it creates two different profiles it creates one for HDR and it creates a separate one for standard dynamic range so that way both of those are going to look good so if you are using an HDR display or you're looking at on a phone maybe on Instagram or something that supports it you're going to see the HDR version if you're on hardware that doesn't support that and you're going to see the standard version so one of the things that's really interesting is when you look at it it really preserves the details in the photographs so I'm going to show you some examples so they don't over apply the adjustments to make it look fake it looks a lot more realistic another thing about photography is they always tell you don't use digital zoom you always want to use optical zoom meaning you know you use the lens in its native resolution and that's going to look good when you use digital zoom typically speaking you use digital zoom it's just the equivalent of just taking that photo blowing it up into Photoshop and then cropping it and then you just lose quality but that's another great thing about computational photography is when it's building these photos out of these bursts merging them together you can zoom in and you can get much better quality even with a digital zoom and so they're combining more of um Adobe's technology you might be familiar with super resolution i've also done tutorials on those so some of the cameras in there are using super resolution to zoom in and even though you may not be at the native optical focal length it's able to use that super resolution to enhance that photo and make it look good at different zooms and it does work really well and this is actually something that the Pixel has done quite well too um but I feel like Indigo is actually doing an even better job so when you do shoot in RAW and JPEG you're not going to see that RAW file until you're editing it so what you're going to see is the JPEG and then when you go to share it you're also going to see the JPEG but the JPEG is using a newer technology which supports HDR so it's going to look great as the JPEG on the phone now if you want to use the RAW file you can edit into Lightroom on the phone or you can use Camera Raw lightroom on the desktop lightroom classic as you know now has this HDR support once again I've also done tutorials on that so all the different technologies are coming together there's two more pieces of technology that are being used on the phone here one of them is is the AI noise reduction this can actually be used as well as the reflection removal which doesn't remove reflections on glasses and things like that it works on plate glass so like shooting through windows and different things like that those are also incorporated into the app along with film manual controls another advantage of good computational photography is low light so you're shooting at night or in low light because it's capturing all these photos it's going to reduce the amount of noise significantly and you can get good low light photos now here's something to bear in mind when we're shooting in regular photo mode this is constantly capturing there's zero lag so when you hit that shutter button boom it gets that exact moment now it may take a moment for it to compute and put everything together but you're going to get exact that exact moment but when you're in night mode in a different mode it takes a little bit longer for it to compute so you're not necessarily going to get zero shutter lag in the night mode and we can also do long exposure another thing to bear in mind when we do the long exposure if you don't put this on a tripod you're not going to get good results it needs to be perfectly stable remember this is in beta this is early beta has just come out so this is going to develop and it's going to get better and better over time all right so I know there could be a lot of different responses and a different thoughts what I'm trying to do is just spark a conversation get us thinking about hey where is the future of photography going what is it going to look like let me know in the comments underneath what you think are you like I'm going to be holding on to my big camera forever no matter what even if the phone shoots better I'm still shooting my big camera that's fine or are you like I cannot wait to get rid of my big camera and just shoot with a phone or maybe you're already shooting with a phone and you're happy with the results i'm curious to let to know your thoughts chime in underneath in the comments and let me know and by the way um if you're new welcome to the cafe hit the subscribe button turn on notifications and you won't miss any of my tutorials and until next time I'll see you at the cafe