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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Depends where it's being used. The phone can easily get that hot if you're shooting in sunlight.
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.
>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...
Because of how aged batteries work, if you don't purposely slow down the phone sometimes it'll shut off, which is worse.
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.
Batteries last years and are already easily replaceable.
They're not even the only consumable part anyway.
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
It's pretty easy for something you do every 2 years and you can get it done by someone else at reasonable price.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
Cheaper than a Leica, but still really damn expensive for a camera app.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first app I’ve ever downloaded for it to tell me my phone isn’t supported.
Same experience on SE3.
Strange, they don't let you download this app from the App Store in Japan.
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.
It's just "raw."
Every instance I've seen it referred to has used the RAW capitalization, including Google's PR, as it's an image format.
.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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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!
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.
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.