AlanLichty
Moderator
I posted a shot yesterday that was taken using Adobe's Project Indigo camera application for iPhones and thought it might be useful to do a more thorough analysis of the app. I spent quite a bit of time testing it out yesterday after importing some images into Adobe Lightroom on my desktop Mac Studio computer to see what all I could do with the DNG outputs.
For starters it should be noted that Project Indigo (PI) is an HDR camera so trying to pretend this is a seamless transition from Apple's built-in camera should be dismissed at the outset. There is an agreed upon standard DNG format for HDR images which have 32 bit color depth instead of the usual 16 bit most of us are used to dealing with and this is what PI exports. What you see previewing the image in PI after the shot on your iPhone is not what you will see if you were to view the image on a device that is not HDR capable (SDR).
For a lot of images the difference isn't all that dramatic but for some images with a really wide dynamic range trying to replicate the look of the HDR scene in SDR is not a simple conversion at all. While Lightroom is capable of editing an HDR image there are many limitations of what you can do with the HDR image when you are done. If you are not using an HDR capable monitor you can't really display what the image looks like anyway so you may as well convert the file to SDR when you import it into LR/ACR to begin with. I finally did make up a Lightroom Preset that does exactly that during the import process along with other tweaks I found useful while I was experimenting yesterday. PI does attach its own Color Profiles to the DNG so you have some choices on where to start with your edits. LR/ACR Adaptive Color Profile is useful for many images and it's worth noting that PI's authors had the look and feel of the Adaptive Color Profile in mind as their own targets. I have found that using the Adaptive Color Profile can be a good starting point while doing edits in SDR. I kept my iPhone near my monitor with the true HDR version of the image on the screen while I fiddled with trying to replicate the HDR rendering in SDR on my computer. Turned out to be a challenging task so if you are looking for turnkey painless edits this might not be an ideal app. I actually like the results enough to keep going with this for now.
A few examples from yesterday:
A Hydrangea after some morning rain:
One more Torch Lily image:
A classic test for HDR imagery is a shot inside of a room looking out the window at a sunny day. In this case a simple scene looking out my office window seated at my desk. Most SDR cameras will fail at either the bright skies or the shadows of the room with no interior illumination. This is one case where the HDR version on my iPhone was crystal clear and the SDR version on import did a faceplant on the skies. Turned out Adobe's Adaptive Color Profile yanked back the DR in the scene and let me cajole the image into having a moderately workable resemblance to the HDR original.
I still feel like I am just getting started in understanding how to best utilize this new app but I really like how the images take to edits in Lightroom compared to the native iPhone app images. The images feel much less fragile than what Apple's camera app is usually giving me to work with.
For starters it should be noted that Project Indigo (PI) is an HDR camera so trying to pretend this is a seamless transition from Apple's built-in camera should be dismissed at the outset. There is an agreed upon standard DNG format for HDR images which have 32 bit color depth instead of the usual 16 bit most of us are used to dealing with and this is what PI exports. What you see previewing the image in PI after the shot on your iPhone is not what you will see if you were to view the image on a device that is not HDR capable (SDR).
For a lot of images the difference isn't all that dramatic but for some images with a really wide dynamic range trying to replicate the look of the HDR scene in SDR is not a simple conversion at all. While Lightroom is capable of editing an HDR image there are many limitations of what you can do with the HDR image when you are done. If you are not using an HDR capable monitor you can't really display what the image looks like anyway so you may as well convert the file to SDR when you import it into LR/ACR to begin with. I finally did make up a Lightroom Preset that does exactly that during the import process along with other tweaks I found useful while I was experimenting yesterday. PI does attach its own Color Profiles to the DNG so you have some choices on where to start with your edits. LR/ACR Adaptive Color Profile is useful for many images and it's worth noting that PI's authors had the look and feel of the Adaptive Color Profile in mind as their own targets. I have found that using the Adaptive Color Profile can be a good starting point while doing edits in SDR. I kept my iPhone near my monitor with the true HDR version of the image on the screen while I fiddled with trying to replicate the HDR rendering in SDR on my computer. Turned out to be a challenging task so if you are looking for turnkey painless edits this might not be an ideal app. I actually like the results enough to keep going with this for now.
A few examples from yesterday:
A Hydrangea after some morning rain:
One more Torch Lily image:
A classic test for HDR imagery is a shot inside of a room looking out the window at a sunny day. In this case a simple scene looking out my office window seated at my desk. Most SDR cameras will fail at either the bright skies or the shadows of the room with no interior illumination. This is one case where the HDR version on my iPhone was crystal clear and the SDR version on import did a faceplant on the skies. Turned out Adobe's Adaptive Color Profile yanked back the DR in the scene and let me cajole the image into having a moderately workable resemblance to the HDR original.
I still feel like I am just getting started in understanding how to best utilize this new app but I really like how the images take to edits in Lightroom compared to the native iPhone app images. The images feel much less fragile than what Apple's camera app is usually giving me to work with.
