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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 23, 2025
373 replies
238867 views

This post applies to the Project Indigo iOS camera app.

Adobe Labs is excited to share an early look at Project Indigo, an iPhone camera app we've started to develop, to get feedback from the photography community. The app offers full manual controls, a more natural ("SLR-like") look, and high image quality in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduces some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps. For more information on the underlying technology, please refer to this Project Indigo blog post.

Before you start with Project Indigo

We recommend using Project Indigo on iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max or newer devices.
(Also supported are 12 Pro/Pro Max, 13 Pro/Pro Max, and all 14-series devices.)

You should have at least 1GB of storage space left for the app, the downloadable AI Models inside the app, and for captured photos.

Download the app from the App Store.
Check out the Project Indigo FAQ, which is updated regularly with new explanations.

Recipes for success when using Project Indigo

To get the maximum out of your images captured with the app, follow these guidelines:

When reviewing the results, focus on Project Indigo's more natural look (in both SDR and HDR). If you haven’t done this before, try viewing the images on your laptop or desktop device, preferably on an HDR screen.

Capture with both JPEG and raw DNGs with file saving enabled. Project Indigo produces computational photography DNG files, which have the same natural look as JPEG images, but much more latitude for editing after capture.

Take control of the camera with the built-in Pro Controls, including controls that are exclusive to a computational camera: Frames to Merge and Merge Method. These may be intimidating for beginners, but with Project Indigo, you can try them for free, and nothing will break—you can always reset the settings to ‘Auto’ and let the camera take back control.

Go to the Indigo Labs page and play with the latest innovations our team can offer. These are only available on mobile via Indigo!

Be patient! Project Indigo is doing a lot of heavy lifting under the hood, and it will reward you with great photos. In return, it may ask you for a bit of time to set up captures when needed, and to wait a few seconds for the image processing to finish.

Sending feedback

Please try the app and share feedback in this community forum thread. If you report a problem you encountered, it would help to include details like which device you are running Project Indigo on, what kind of scene you were trying to capture, what you were trying to achieve with the camera, and as much information as possible about what you like or do not like about the resulting photo quality. Our team will continually monitor this thread to track issues and improve future experiences.

To improve the performance and results of Project Indigo, it is important that examples of images that do not meet your expectations are forwarded to the team via your report. A large variety of file formats are allowed as attachments in these forum posts. The best option is to attach your image's raw file directly to your feedback post. Note that there is a 50 MB limit on an attachment's file size. If your raw file is too large to attach, the best option is to share the file via a file-sharing service (Dropbox or similar) and then share the link in your feedback post. Thank you for continuing to provide feedback on the Project Indigo camera!

Boris Ajdin: Product Manager, NextCam

Posted by:

homerwooper

Participant

why can't use flashlight

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade qdwang, the developer of Camac mentioned that iOS 26.4 supports 12 bit avif. Would this benefit Indigo going forward to support true 12 bit hdr raw? This would be amazing if Indigo can do this!

P

powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade I want to quickly ask if there are improvements coming mainly i care about the 2x super res zoom and a new 48mp dng mode by stacking several shifted 12mp images? Currently the 2x zoom is not reliable,takes a lot of time to process,heats the device, drains battery and the output results look significantly softer than a 2x zoom from say an iPhone 15 stock camera app especially when there is subject motion present in the scene and it seems like the output even in dng is significantly denoised especially in the areas of the moving subject/s. Also on the edges of the image there are areas that look like blur is applied to them and text doesnt look sharp at all so capturing anything moving results in a blurry mess!

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

Boris said the tuning work has been completed, especially for the 17 series, and they are working to polish up on some things before release. Sadly he didn’t give any details on how they look now vs current version :( @BorisTheBlade maybe you can elaborate a bit more? For example, the issue powerfull_elixir5e29 mentioned with super rez and motion subject are mostly because of spatial denoise improperly tuned? How are they looking now? Has manual exposure been fixed? Before it doesn’t matter what exposure you set, it gets overwritten by the code, to have the set specific look based on tenthousandpigeon said on reddit.

Also the alignment of images that has been brought to attention before that the images tend to shift to the upper left area in night mode on all rear lenses.

P

powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@nhan_8084 but i am specifically asking about the super res zoom dng and jpeg results and if they have been improved to match dedicated 2x telephoto lenses even when there are moving subjects in the frame and not really asking about the other algorithm for just denoising and dynamic range but for the super resolution and denoising one, the one when you press the 2x button.

colorzh

Participant

I Use Iphone 17e, But it seem not work, is not support iphone 17e? OS version is ios 26.3.1

ttphoto151000

Participant

Hi, I’m new to the Pi app, as I’ve only just upgraded to an iPhone 17 pro. I have been a photographer for a number of years and I am really enjoying it so far.
I have also just purchased the Telesin Master Grip for my phone and whilst there is some functionality with this grip, I’d really like the dial on the Telesin grip to be able to move between shutter speed and ISO in the Pro controls.

Do you have any plans to offer full support for Telesin grips?

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Thank you for reaching out, and welcome to the community. Indigo is still in experimental stage, so 3rd party hardware or software support is not on our priority list yet - there is a lot of work to do to add more magical features, improve on the existing ones, and make the app overall faster, more stable, and more delightful for daily use. We will consider support for such grips down the line once we get the base functionality and quality of the app to the level that makes us happy. In the meantime, if there are other aspects of the app which would make your experience better, please let us know.

Blueflame09

Participant

I used the indigo app on my 16 pro. very much impressed. recently changed to android. I’m really waiting for the android release of your app. Is there any tentative release date?

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nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

they mentioned it’s their goals to have it but not any time soon as iPhone is priority and there’s still lots of work.

sam_c_om_

Participant

Dear Project Indigo Team,

I’m writing to you as a huge fan of Project Indigo. I’m deeply impressed by the work you’ve done with computational photography; the way the app handles image processing and sensor data is truly top-tier and has become essential for my mobile photography workflow.

I’m reaching out with a specific feature request that would be a significant quality-of-life improvement for users who treat their iPhones as serious imaging tools. I frequently use high-quality external lenses (such as anamorphic or telephoto glass) mounted on my phone to expand its technical capabilities.

Because of the optical design of these external lenses, the image projected onto the sensor is often inverted. Currently, this makes it very difficult to utilize Project Indigo’s computational features in real-time, as both the preview and the final processed output are flipped.

The Request: Could you add a toggle to flip or invert the image (Horizontal/Vertical) within the app?

As an app dedicated to the technical excellence of computational photography, providing a way to correct for external optics would be a massive asset for the enthusiast community. It would allow us to compose and leverage your processing power natively without the need for destructive transformations in post-production.

Thank you for your dedication to pushing the boundaries of what mobile sensors can do. I look forward to the future of the app!

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

you can easily flip or invert these in light room mobile, or any editing app I assumed? I’ve done it before in lrm.

sam_c_om_

Participant

yes sherlock , i am absolutely aware of the fact that i can easily flip them . but if you ever actually touched a camera in your entire life , which it seems you haven’t , you would be aware that how practically impossible it is to click a photo when the preview is inverted .

K

kathys8031374

Participant

Hey there, user of Project Indigo since launch.

Some issues I’ve noticed on my 17 Pro Max vs Indigo on my 15 Pro Max:

image quality seems to have degraded quite a bit, I often have lots of color noise, green splotchiness in shaded areas and issues focusing even on high contrast subjects (a raven against a bright background for instance).

also, vs my 15 pro max, telephoto quality is significantly reduced. Even at 10x on my 15 pro max, which produced beautiful, low noise, high fidelity results even for small text in the distance, the 8x option for 17 pro max has blurry details, much higher noise and generally unacceptable quality vs the built in camera app when shooting raw. This is a stark difference vs the 15 pro max, where Indigo produced much better results than the camera app.

The framing of my photos changes now after I’ve pressed the shutter button, to me this signifies that the shutter is not actually being triggered at the time of user input, this is my most high priority request right now in addition to photos sometimes not actually saving after being captured.

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

they are in the process of updating the algorithm for jpeg output. Hopefully they can fix the tele as well! @BorisTheBlade can you update us on the progress and what have been done so far?

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade tagging you again for the progress update for the imaging processing on jpeg of the tele since it’s the weakest part of Indigo currently for the 17 pro/pro max.

jinsetnand

Participant

My Project Indigo app is not working on my iOS 26.3. The app immediately crashes when I try to open it. I’ve already tried restarting my device and reinstalling the app, but the issue persists. Is there a known fix for this? 😭🥺