81 pointsby bookofjoe7 days ago16 comments
  • mrtksn4 days ago
    This is the first time my iPhone 14 Pro felt inadequate.

    The app is so heavy that the phone is overheating after the first photo. it consumes so much resources that’s the music was playing in the background stopped because my AirPods connection dropped. For the very first time on this phone I felt like I need an upgrade, it felt like the last days of my iPhone 6s. I didn’t know you can do that to an iPhone.

    The photo quality is supperb though, obviously not DSLR replacement but it really gives you that feel. Apple’s own processing has become too boring, sometimes I use Halide just to have unprocessed raws.

    • qwopmaster4 days ago
      Same experience on 14 pro - it got noticeably hot after 2nd photo, and after 3rd the app crashed and OS was choppy for a few minutes. And that was indoors, in 22C and screen fairly dim. Never seen anything like it; as-is I’d avoid the app lest it actually damages something. The photos themselves do look better than apple’s default cam, but not by a huge amount. Most noticeable is better range, like a photo of a blue sky with a few clouds seen through your window that takes up a third of the photo, which by default is either very dim inside or mostly indistinct blue-gray or blown out if focusing inside. Super-resolution however, especially at 6x (double 14 pro’s 3x optical zoom) is actual wizardry.

      On the other hand night photos seem like garbage - there’s a bit more stuff visible than on default 3sec night mode but the colors are nonsensical and details nonexistent, certainly nothing even remotely close to what adobe promises on their webpage.

      All in all I’m not sure what use it is with the terrible performance, outside of long-range photos that you really want to shoot at 6x zoom and keep as much detail as possible.

      • pantulis4 days ago
        Another datapoint with an 15 Pro Max. I shot a couple of pics indoors in my own room and got the message. Seems the app is continuosly processing what's coming from the sensor.
    • Aurornis4 days ago
      > The app is so heavy that the phone is overheating after the first photo.

      I have the same phone and no overheating errors here.

      Do you mean the phone got slightly warm? That’s not overheating, it’s just what happens when you use an app that leverage the CPU for anything non-trivial. It’s not overheating.

      EDIT: The screenshot below clarifies that the heat warning is a message in the app, not the actual iOS overheating protection as ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/118431 ). Regardless, I still can’t trigger the in-app temperature warning on my phone.

      • mrtksn4 days ago
        It's literally the app complaining about it: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/b191e7b8-8dad-4fed-...

        It will dim the screen soon, so much that it's unusable outdoors. I wasn't able to capture a photo outdoors yesterday using this app because of this. The first photo slowly finished processing but the app crashed, lost the photo. Then the device was overheating, the screen dimmed to unusable and the FPS dropped, the app become unresponsive and the music went away, the AirPods re-connected. Couldn't even try to capture a second one.

        It wasn't even that hot, just 28C.

        • josephg4 days ago
          I’d be shocked if this is an actual limitation of the hardware. Modern iPhones have plenty of horsepower for computational photography.

          I bet this a software bug of some sort - like they’re using the cpu where it should be using Metal or something. Hopefully they can sort it out.

          • khurs4 days ago
            iPhone have less ram though, compared to Pixels and androids in general.

            https://iosref.com/ram-processor

          • astrange4 days ago
            Depends where it's being used. The phone can easily get that hot if you're shooting in sunlight.
        • Aurornis4 days ago
          Interesting. I can get the app to crash if I spam the photo button and queue up the maximum number (8) of background processing tasks. Feels like an OOM error if I had to guess. Can’t get any of the other things you experienced to occur, though I haven’t tried Bluetooth audio.
    • vachina4 days ago
      Par for the course for an Adobe app. Bloated, slow and meh output.
      • fortyseven3 days ago
        Weird how "superb" was misspelled as "meh" here.
    • leptons4 days ago
      >For the very first time on this phone I felt like I need an upgrade, it felt like the last days of my iPhone 6s. I didn’t know you can do that to an iPhone.

      Apple got caught purposely slowing down older model iPhones.

      https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

      • astrange4 days ago
        Because of how aged batteries work, if you don't purposely slow down the phone sometimes it'll shut off, which is worse.
        • throwaway144524 days ago
          Maybe Apple should use their proverbial ingenuity and inventiveness to invent a smartphone design that lets you open its back shell without screws to allow the user to replace their own battery, though I'm not sure if the technology for it is quite there yet.
          • xp844 days ago
            Sure, 100%, though that's a separate topic to the ridiculous urban legend that came out of that story. Something still must be done when a user has a degraded battery that can't handle the full draw of the CPU.
            • vbezhenar4 days ago
              It was literally court decision that led to the Apple implementing switch allowing users to switch their smartphones to unsafe mode.

              I still think that Apple was right there by not implementing this switch, and judge was an idiot. But that's just me.

          • astrange4 days ago
            Batteries last years and are already easily replaceable.

            They're not even the only consumable part anyway.

            • throwaway144524 days ago
              Last as in "works" is a very low bar, they are going to have severely reduced capacity, which also affects performance.

              >Batteries ... are already easily replaceable

              Is this[1] what easy looks like?

              [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fUmW-2swg

              • astrange4 days ago
                > Last as in "works" is a very low bar, they are going to have severely reduced capacity, which also affects performance.

                Batteries tend to degrade to about 85% quickly and then spend a long time at that capacity. Couldn't tell you why.

                A USB battery is a more useful thing to have, for instance because you don't have to turn off the phone to use it.

                > Is this[1] what easy looks like?

                For something you'd do every 2-3 years, sure. He's put in some extra steps in that video I think.

              • greenpresident4 days ago
                Ifixit score of 7 plus best parts availability of any phone makes for a great combination in my mind.
                • xp844 days ago
                  On the other hand, before the iPhone, literally every phone had a back cover that could be removed with bare hands and batteries held in by friction. After iPhone, all phones are sealed and require tiny screws to be removed, special adhesives to be defeated (god help you if you break off the stretchy adhesive strips), and of course seals to be replaced. And all this was done from the 2007 iPhone, over a decade before Apple did any IP67 rating of any kind, so none of it was done for waterproofing.

                  So, "Apple killed battery swappability" is a fair thing to say.

              • mrtksn4 days ago
                It's pretty easy for something you do every 2 years and you can get it done by someone else at reasonable price.

                iPhones being hard to repair, let alone change the battery is such a ridiculous meme.

        • leptons4 days ago
          Instead of offering to replace the batteries, or making a phone with an easy to replace battery, Apple chose the shady move and hid their "solution" from the public and just slowed down older phones.

          >"In March, Apple agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle claims of intentionally slowing down older phones."

          They got slapped on the wrist. This resulted in them making the batteries slightly easier to replace, but their batteries are still impossible to replace by the average iPhone owner.

        • whywhywhywhy4 days ago
          The issue was they lied about it and said they were not slowing phones down until someone figure out they were in fact slowing down phones.

          Now the reason is valid and should have been a toggle from the get go but they still told us they were not doing it when they were.

        • sixothree4 days ago
          I don’t buy this excuse. I experienced it first hand with my iPhone 4. When moving from iOS 6 to 7 my phone became unusable. As did everyone’s. And there was no going back to iOS 6. It wasn’t the battery in any way. The upgrade basically made the phone unusable.
          • astrange4 days ago
            Those are called performance bugs. That was a long time and a lot of software development cycle changes ago.

            If it helps I believe the EU just made it illegal two days ago to release updates that make battery life worse. But I could've confused some of the details there.

            • vbezhenar4 days ago
              It was not a bug. I have similar story with my iPhone 4S became unusable with iOS 7. It was never fixed. One day I managed to jailbreak it, rolling back to iOS 6 and was astonished how fast and smooth it is.

              They just implemented iOS 7 with much more compute requirements, so only newer phones were able to run it smoothly. The progress of mobile CPUs these old days was crazy, so I don't really complain about it, it was inevitable.

              • astrange4 days ago
                > They just implemented iOS 7 with much more compute requirements, so only newer phones were able to run it smoothly.

                Yeah, that's a bug. Any regression on any supported device is a bug.

                That was a very, very rushed release.

          • xp844 days ago
            Those are separate issues. No one ever proved Apple set out to do that. Sure, they do care as little as the next company how their older hardware runs a new OS, but it's silly to believe it's a conspiracy. Tell me, do you believe Apple (A) adds in a bunch of conditional code to trigger just older phones to infinitely loop to kill your performance? Or (B) that they deliberately add a bunch of poorly-performing code, but it's code that everyone has to run and only the newest phones can manage?

            It seems like A would have been whistleblown by now, and B would be idiotic for them to do on purpose since it would make their new devices unnecessarily slow too.

            My opinion is basically B but without malice, it's just that they're obsessed with tons of animation and other eye candy, and added a lot of bloat in those years in general, rushing code out the door out of a desire to hit iOS release dates and the synchronized iPhone release dates they used to have.

            • leptons4 days ago
              > No one ever proved Apple set out to do that.

              Yes, they did in fact prove that. That's why Apple had to pay $500 million dollars to settle, because they got caught doing shady shit.

              • xp844 days ago
                They settled without admitting any wrongdoing of course, but what they "got caught doing" was simply not disclosing what was happening -- and that's the only thing they changed afterward.

                It was still the correct course of action, and obviously not done maliciously -- a phone that was so slow it was annoying to use, and a phone that reboots 10x a day are equally 'incentive' to buy a new phone, so I fail to see how the throttling benefited Apple one bit.

                In fact, I'd say the unreliable rebooting one would have provided stronger incentive to replace it vs. a slow one.

                • leptons3 days ago
                  The right thing to do is to offer a battery replacement program. Instead they went for the e-waste option.
  • Brajeshwar4 days ago
    For those interested in this, Leica LUX is the alternative iOS Camera. It also works for those who cannot afford to own a Leica.

    https://leica-camera.com/en-SG/photography/leica-apps/leica-...

    • mrtksn4 days ago
      Wow I love that. The processing looks like a Leica indeed, the UI has a Leica feel and put me in a mood for candid Leica style photos haha :)

      When using a DSLR I almost always shoot in (A)perture mode, it helps you control how much you separate the subject from the background and it's the thing I miss the most on phone. The portrait mode isn't quite the same.

      It's the first app that I came across to have an aperture mode, cool.

      PS: Apparently it lets you capture in all modes, but to edit the parameters after taking the picture it requires the pro mode.

    • average_r_user4 days ago
      I really love this app, but I'm not a fan of the subscription model. While I understand the business reasoning, I'd much prefer having the option to purchase individual presets instead of committing to a full subscription.

      I recently used the B/W preset by Greg Williams during my trip to Iceland, and the results were fantastic. The grainy texture it added to my photos was exactly what I was looking for and really enhanced the dramatic Icelandic landscapes.

    • raylad4 days ago
      I just tried it and the Leica Chrome setting looked better to me than anything the normal camera app or Project Indigo produced.

      But I hate subscription apps. And the rest of the UI seems quite clumsy.

    • throwaway3141554 days ago
      Cheaper than a Leica, but still really damn expensive for a camera app.
      • al_borland4 days ago
        And if you want the shutter button accessory they advertise, that’s $395 (but sold out currently). That’s a lot of money for a MagSafe button. A person could get an entry level DSLR from Canon for about the same price.
  • stlava4 days ago
    I’m impressed they managed to make an app that makes me not want to use it or my phone to take photos! After I used it for about 5 mins I resolved to dust off my older DSLR and use it instead.
  • jrgaston4 days ago
    It's not a dslr replacement, what a weird claim. My Nikons and Fujis are so much nicer to hold, to adjust, to shoot. But for a phone camera the s.w is ok. More adjustable than the iPhone app. I like the controls, the current settings text, and built in help text.

    Only knock so far is it runs hot: never seen an overheating warning ever on my iPhone 14pro. Now i get one every ten or fifteen minutes when using Indigo.

  • modeless4 days ago
    Marc Levoy is an "engineer"? Sure, but maybe more relevant is the fact that he's a well-known computer graphics researcher and professor emeritus at Stanford.
    • danjl4 days ago
      And Florian is an ILM OG who wrote some of their most amazing tools.
  • thedougd4 days ago
    This is the first app I’ve ever downloaded for it to tell me my phone isn’t supported.
    • jeroenhd4 days ago
      I'm surprised they did a hardware check within the app rather than just restrict the app on the iOS app store side. Surely they should've marked your phone incompatible before you wasted your time downloading the app?

      I do wonder what makes older phones incompatible, though. Others are complaining about the performance, so it could be that the low amounts of RAM Apple puts in their phones is starting to catch up, or it could be as simple as them not having trained their AI models for some older phones yet.

    • yumraj4 days ago
      Same experience on SE3.
  • Jotalea4 days ago
    I see many users reporting overheating, incompatibility, and lag on 1 or 2 year old devices by using this app, which is ridiculous. If a flagship phone released this recently cannot handle an app like this, the problem might not be the phone, but rather the app itself. I simply cannot believe they (adobe) screwed up this bad, but I hope they will fix it before I get to try the app by myself. I do not want a broken expensive device.
  • dwayne_dibley4 days ago
    I know this is ranty, but I really miss internet sites that aren't 60% adverts, 30% padding and 10% actual thing. This isn't anything more than an announcement page.
  • jeroenhd4 days ago
    Runs on my iPhone 15, but not well. Phone heats up like crazy and processing photos takes a while.

    The end result is almost the same as the pictures the normal camera app takes. I think I must be missing something because this looks like a worse re-implementation of the normal camera app to me. Maybe I need to take the app out at dusk to take some pictures in more challenging conditions?

    I still prefer the photos from my Pixel over the photos from my work iPhone.

  • Springtime4 days ago
    The article's wording suggests this supports computational RAW which would be useful. That is, auto stacking multiple captures into a single RAW (a la Google Camera for Pixel phones), rather than the traditional single capture. Allowing for reduced noise and higher dynamic range.

    It's interesting as when I last looked a couple years ago only Fujifilm had a mirrorless digital camera (with cropped sensor) that supported this on-device.

    • DidYaWipe4 days ago
      It's just "raw."
      • Springtime4 days ago
        Every instance I've seen it referred to has used the RAW capitalization, including Google's PR, as it's an image format.
        • meatmanek4 days ago
          .RAW is an image format, but it's rarely used. Raw photos are usually stored in a manufacturer-defined format like .NEF (Nikon) or .CR3 (Canon), or occasionally in .DNG files. Nevertheless, it's fairly common to see the word capitalized as RAW.
        • strogonoff4 days ago
          You are certainly free to write in any fashion you want, but any time you turn “raw” (as in raw photography, raw image data, raw image formats) into “RAW”, or Wasm into “WASM”, etc., you will[0] be knowingly wrong—like non-dyslexic people who choose to spell “u” instead of “you”, except unlike them you will not be saving keystrokes and you will be perceived as shouting, which I presume is almost never the intended vibe in the context.

          Obviously, it’s not the end of the world. Employees of famous companies, occasionally even reputable and knowledgeable people are not immune to using wrong or mistaken spelling. This is explained by a simple fact that there are plenty of professionals who are dyslexic and/or careless about spelling, while still being experts in their subject areas. There is nothing wrong about that, but evidence of their misuse of written language is not grounds for an argument that the wrong spelling is correct. Researching what the word actually stands for takes less than a minute, and it should clear any doubt and avoid unnecessary arguments.

          [0] Now that you know…

        • DidYaWipe4 days ago
          R, A, and W don't stand for anything. It's raw data off the sensor, not an acronym. Therefore not capitalized.

          You can find millions of instances of any given literacy-impaired error. "Would of" and "your not going to find this" are wrong... but they're out there by the boatload. No need to propagate them further.

          • Springtime4 days ago
            My impression has been that the capitalization is to identify the word as an image format (a stand-in for whatever actual format is used), rather than being an initialism. Canon, Nikon and Sony among other hardware and software companies use it in this way.

            ZIP similarly doesn't stand for anything but is styled as such. So I suppose the pushback is more against being used as a stand-in for generic raw image formats.

            Edit: just noticed your comment was greyed but I didn't downvote it fwiw.

            • DidYaWipe3 days ago
              All good.

              You can also find tons of instances of people referring to Apple's computers as MACs. And that one is even worse because MAC is an actual computer-hardware term.

              So "RAW" may not be a well-known acronym, but it doesn't mean it will never be.

              The Brits suffer from the opposite problem: making acronyms into regular proper names. It's endemic over there; their articles are replete with references to the nonexistent "Nasa," "Nato," and other entities. In at least one case in the last few years they did this to a piece of legislation where there was actually a British company with the name they were misusing.

  • preek4 days ago
    After the first shot on my iPhone 13 Pro in default settings, it immediately told me my phone was overheating and going to be unstable. Then it crashed. I tried once more, turned off raw mode, waited _minutes_ for one image to process and now my screen turns off and on again randomly while I type this comment.
    • Jotalea4 days ago
      I expected worse from Adobe.
  • coolandsmartrr4 days ago
    Strange, they don't let you download this app from the App Store in Japan.
  • bix64 days ago
    Is this an actual SLR replacement / anyone know the RAW size and print size at 300dpi?

    Last time I sent iPhone photos into my print shop they kicked them back.

    • tlhunter4 days ago
      > Is this an actual SLR replacement

      There's just no way to replace the massive 35mm sensor of a larger DSLR / mirrorless camera. The amount of light gathered can only be simulated by capturing many frames. True depth of field can only be emulated by imperfectly blurring estimated background area via software, leading to goofy blurred hairs. Even the reported megapixels of a smartphone contain a quarter or less the equivalent DSLR resolution detail (a 24MP smartphone photo is roughly equivalent to the detail of a 6MP DSLR photo).

      • josephg4 days ago
        Yep this. I’ve been getting into photography over the last 9 months or so. I got a Sony a7iv and an increasing pile of lenses for it. It’s making me a huge camera snob. The truth is that nothing a phone can do can come close to the image quality of a proper modern camera. You can spot the difference a mile off. Photos from phones look like they’ve been passed through stable diffusion or something. They just look wrong in comparison to a real camera with real lenses and real lights.

        It shouldn’t be surprising. Real depth of field is physically impossible with a small lens. And cameras have teeny tiny lenses and sensors. It’s impressive how good the photos are given the hardware, but the hardware is very very bad in comparison to a dedicated camera with replaceable lenses.

        • astrange4 days ago
          Nobody cares about image quality, that's not a goal in itself.

          (There's an old camera influencer named Ken Rockwell who constantly pushes this; he has every possible opinion at once and is trolling most of the time, but he's right about this.)

          The smallness of a phone means it can take pictures larger cameras can't because you have it with you when the picture is happening. And that's what really matters.

          > They just look wrong in comparison to a real camera with real lenses and real lights.

          You can use real lights with a phone camera all you want!

          • josephg4 days ago
            > Nobody cares about image quality

            Hi! I'm right here! I care about image quality!

            Image quality helps me feel proud of my photos. If I don't feel proud of my photos, its way less fun to wander around taking them - and I just don't bother. Image quality actively makes or breaks some of the joy of the medium for me.

            I went to a nature photography exhibit / competition today. The exhibition was full of incredible photos of nature taken from all over the world. But some of the images were lower quality. There weren't enough pixels for the printer to do a good job, or you could see digital noise in them. I wanted to like them just as much, but I didn't. The photos weren't as good.

            > The smallness of a phone means [...] you have it with you when the picture is happening. And that's what really matters.

            What a weird statement. "What really matters" is completely contextual. What matters when you're entering a photography competition is completely different from what matters at your friends' birthday party. Or at a wedding, or on a photo walk, or a live show.

            Use the right camera for the job. I personally hate the look of the photos my phone takes. My phone is almost never the right camera for me.

            • astrange4 days ago
              > There weren't enough pixels for the printer to do a good job, or you could see digital noise in them.

              Much of that can be fixed with shooting raw and editing in Lightroom, which is the same process you'd use for a bigger camera.

              As for printing, it matters how it's being viewed. You're looking at it up close, which is the physical equivalent of pixel peeping and relatively rare. For something like a highway billboard, a low resolution photo is actually fine because you're so far away from it.

              I'd suggest trying crappier traditional cameras to learn flexibility. Last time I took a photography class we used disposable B&W cameras and pinhole cameras and developed the film ourselves.

              Btw, one thing I've always found interesting is that people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go. For film cameras, rangefinders, medium- and large-format cameras have better "image quality" than SLRs. Those Apple product images that look like 3D renders are real photos shot with large-format digital backs from Phase One.

              (This is good to know if you have a mirrorless camera, because you can adapt rangefinder lenses to them and they're very cheap for the quality you get.)

              • josephg3 days ago
                > Much of that can be fixed with shooting raw and editing in Lightroom, which is the same process you'd use for a bigger camera. .. As for printing, it matters how it's being viewed. You're looking at it up close, which is the physical equivalent of pixel peeping and relatively rare.

                The photos were printed and displayed in a gallery. I didn't need to pull out a magnifying glass to notice which images were a bit blurry. It was obvious at a glance. The images in question were worse. There was one beautiful B&W image of a Meerkat, and you could see each strand of hair on his belly. Another image was a lion's face - and the hairs were all a little blurry. I think the photographer cropped in on the image past the usable resolution of their camera. I'm sure it looked fine on a phone, but it didn't make a great print. Shooting raw and editing in lightroom can't replace missing pixels.

                Quality doesn't matter until it does. And then it really matters!

                The thing I really hate about the photos I get from my phone is the over processing that the software applies to the images. Some part of my brain intuitively understands focal planes and how lights interact with the colour of objects. My phone produces images which just don't look right. They're in an uncanny valley where they don't quite make sense to my brain. Looking at them stresses me out a little.

                Maybe its worth trying my phone with RAW images, so I can turn all that crap off.

                > people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go.

                It really depends on the camera and the photographer, and what kind of quality you're going for. DSLRs can make use of larger lenses. As a result, you get natural depth-of-field as a consequence of the optics. If you're using an old digital camera, there's a good chance the sensor isn't as modern as the sensor in your phone. So you might get worse low-light performance and worse autofocus. But the depth of field is impossible to recreate optically using the tiny lenses on a phone. Phones can simulate DoF using computational tricks, but it never looks quite right. A person's face will be in focus and some of their hair out of focus. Its weird.

                My dad took some photos of me when I was a kid some ~30 years ago on his old SLR film camera. They're stunning photos. Those photos are much more beautiful than the photos he takes now on his iphone.

                And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!

                • astrange3 days ago
                  > And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!

                  Only if you get DSLR lenses! Rangefinder lenses are cheap and smaller (because they don't need to work with the SLR mirror), but the adapters are typically manual focus/aperture.

      • 4 days ago
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    • DidYaWipe4 days ago
      Software can't turn a phone into an SLR. It's an asinine claim.

      It's not that the application can't bring value to the platform, but they need to better convey what it is. "Making images that look like they're from an SLR" smacks of fakery.

      • bookofjoe4 days ago
        >Software can't turn a phone into an SLR.

        Not yet — but not never...

  • bn-l4 days ago
    > Adobe

    Not interested.

    • 0manrho4 days ago
      My sentiment exactly. Unless it's FOSS for some reason, anything Adobe - especially if it's work/income related - is a hard pass.
  • vr464 days ago
    Indigo is excellent so far, a little bit buggy, but I am seriously impressed. (iPhone 12 Pro)

    And I have a Q2, a 5D4 and a 645Z, this little app is really great, and colour me surprised.

  • neya4 days ago
    Who cares, it's Adobe. They'll eventually steal your work under some under-the-hood TOS update and even charge you for it. Don't believe me? Ask the existing CS customers. Fuck Adobe. They should be boycotted to oblivion.