The last couple of years, I’ve been posting fewer and fewer wrist shots on Instagram and other social media.  One of the big reasons why being that the newest generation of iPhones have, in many respects, gone backward in their over all image appeal to me.  When I look back at my image catalog, I much prefer the photos I took with the iPhone 10 through about the iPhone 13 vs. the photos taken with the 14, 15, and now iPhone 16.

RISE OF THE SMART HDR OVERLOARDS (IPHONE 14 AND BEYOND)

Starting with the iPhone 14 and especially the 15 series, Apple amped up Smart HDR and Deep Fusion. These features use machine learning to tone-map images in a way that’s optimized for face detection, scene recognition, and balanced highlights/shadows. Sounds great, right?

Except:

Ironically, as iPhones have gotten smarter, my wrist shots have gotten dumber. The iPhone X through 13 era gave me clean, punchy, DSLRlike photos straight out of camera. The newer models seem to be trying too hard to impress the algorithm—and not the watch lover. Enter Adobe Indigo – which Adobe quietly debut in May of 2025.

WHAT IS ADOBE PROJECT INDIGO?

Project Indigo is a free iOS camera app from Adobe Labs (no login required) designed to give your phone images a more natural, “SLRlike” aesthetic using advanced computational photography techniques. Led by research engineers including Marc Levoy, (the same mind behind Google Pixel’s legendary camera tech). Indigo stacks up to 32 underexposed frames, merges them, and reduces noise while preserving dynamic range and texture—without the smoothed-out feel of typical smartphone HDR.  For taking wrists shots, the benefits of Project Indigo are:

• Natural tonality: Rather than hypersaturating and sharpening, Indigo leans into subtle warmth, gentle shadows, and realistic highlights—perfect for showing off a watch’s dial details without an overprocessed look.
• Manual controls: You can tweak shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, focus (complete with a magnified loupe), and white balance. This gives you full creative control over how the shot is composed—and saved—as JPEG or DNG (RAW) file.
• Super-resolution zoom: If you like tighter wrist shot crops or creative angles, Indigo’s multi-frame superresolution can yield crisper zoomed-in frames than the native camera’s digital zoom.
• Zero shutter lag (in Photo mode): It constantly captures frames and freezes the moment you press the shutter, so you won’t miss a blink-level expression—or a sun flare on your crystal.

Oddly, when you get close to your subject (watch) the camera doesn’t automatically switch to macro mode as is the case with the native iPhone app.  Instead you see a banner recommending macro mode with a button to press.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to go into macro mode ahead of taking your shot.

Here’s the first example I took of my Rolex Explorer II 16570 using Project Indigo:

The first thing I like so much about the photo is the natural looking depth of field – very DSLR like.  The colors and the skin tone are fantastic.  With the exception of the portrait orientation, indicative of a phone camera shot, I’d believe you if you told me you took this image with a “real” camera.

Project Indigo isn’t just for wrist shots – in most cases, I tend toprefer it over the native iPhone app for any photos I take.  I’ve even mapped PI to my phone’s lock screen for quick access:

For those that want to edit their phone images, Abobe has a button in the app that will transition your image directly into Lightoom Mobile – very useful work flow for Creative Cloud subscribers like myself.

With the “Project” designation, the assumption is that Indigo is a work in progress.  Currently you can’t for example take video with the app.  You can’t access the front facing camera with the app, and there’s no portrait mode.  But as it stands, Project Indigo is easily the best replacement app for the native iPhone camera app that I’ve seen – and that includes the Leica Lux app I wrote about a few months ago.

Project Indigo might be Adobe’s smartest product teaser yet. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it scratches the itch Apple somehow forgot how to reach. But if you’ve been in the Adobe ecosystem long enough, you know what happens next. Free trials are just Creative Cloud seedlings waiting to sprout.

Now…time to enjoy spamming Instagram with hair wrist shots.