The old alley from King Street into the Merrywalks

I recently read an article about 'Indigo', a new and free camera app for use on more recent Apple iPhones. It is produced by Adobe and is I think what is referred to as a beta version.

Reading about its technical aspects intrigued me so I downloaded a copy and this blip is my first test. I went to town to have an eye test and being a few minutes early I stood outside the entrance the shopping mall where the optician’s premises are. Looking at this building I was a bit annoyed when I’d seen that the repairs to the flanking wall adjacent to the pathway had used bricks to infill the former doorways. The building is old and made of traditional Cotswold limestone as were most buildings built before the Eighteenth century. It jars my sense of ‘proper’ respect for ancient buildings, being a trustee of Stroud Preservation Trust for nearly twenty years.

This building’s frontage faces onto King Street which was one of the earliest and main thoroughfares of the town, where early hotels were built and from where stagecoaches would depart for towns and cities such as Bath, Bristol, Gloucester and London. The view up the alley leads onto George Street which connects with the London Road closet to the most distant buildings you can see.

I must admit I’m quite impressed with this image’s technical qualities, which were taken as a snap to see how it would cope with the light, the three dimensional qualities of the subject and it sense of editing in Adobe Lightroom. I think I’d recommend slippers to give it a go, as it tries to emulate some of the controls that we are more used to in DSLR and mirrorless camera systems.

I’ll add a brief synopsis that I read on one of the reviews I’ve looked at to explain more.

From FStoppers.com:
Adobe believes modern mobile phone cameras have become quite good in terms of colour, resolution, and dynamic range, but they can be held back by the software that controls them. Adobe says smartphone pictures often look overly bright, have low contrast, and high colour saturation, with overly strong smoothing and sharpening. They also believe, quite rightly, that smartphones don't give you enough manual control over aperture, exposure time, ISO, and focus, and they know that photographers want the ability to save photos in a raw format. Some smartphone apps have copied these features—except for aperture, which is typically fixed on a mobile camera.
This Project Indigo app is the result.

For more detailed information Adobe released this technical article, hoping to get good feedback from photographers: