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Friday Slide Show: Ornaments Revisited
26 December 2025
Ornaments? Again? We shot these very same ornaments in 2023 with a new camera: the iPhone 15 Pro Max. So why did we repeat the experience this year? Well, we have another new camera.
Oh, it's still the iPhone 15 Pro Max on the hardware end. But the brains running it has changed. We've been using Adobe's Project Indigo camera app with it the past year. And it really does feel like a new camera.
In 2023, we shot the ornaments in late afternoon daylight. Plenty of it. And still we had trouble handling the phone as a camera. Not to mention using macro mode hand held.
Indigo addresses those concerns, giving us a more convenient telephoto option as well as macro. And it's multi-exposure combined processing makes it possible to hand hold those macro shots in much dimmer light this time. We shot on a dark day during storm with many of these illuminated solely by the tree lights.
So while the subject may be the same, the images are not.
Nor, we're happy to say, was the experience. The things we complained about in 2023 have been addressed in 2025.
We don't think Indigo gets as much credit as it deserves. It's often the reason why we pick up the iPhone instead of our mirrorless or dSLR cameras, which don't offer that kind of post-capture processing that makes difficult captures possible.
Camera manufacturers might think about that. They've never paid much attention to software development (our specifications tables have no place for it). But software is clearly advancing the art these days. Maybe camera makers should make a New Year's resolution to focus more seriously on that.
We'd suggest doing it with Indigo, though.
