P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

I know I already mentioned this but after getting one and learning more about the 17 Pro, I think a shippable "video night mode" is possible and worthwhile for the 17 Pro main camera. It has 12 GB of RAM and the SoC is so fast, it's capable of doing all the required processing in a reasonable amount of time, and I believe there's new software (is Indigo able to use ProRes RAW as a basis for its own video night mode?). Apple really dropped the ball not making a video night mode for the 17 Pro, this could be Indigo's hit feature. Any time I take videos at night, the results are not good. I feel like this is the top priority 

By @WillSnaps

We are interested in that too, and will be exploring options around it. Something like that is not trivial to do, and we need to see what kind of experience we can add around such an algorithm to make it nice to use.

I am currently experimenting with IR photography using my iPhone. I have found that the quality of the images from Pi is far superior to those from other apps. 🙂 The only thing that would be really helpful is a dedicated black-and-white mode. Please add this to your app.

By @photopoeth

We are interested in adding a B&W mode also, though to do it right we cannot just "remove the color" from the regular Indigo images. Instead, we have to make a new dataset of custom-edited B&W images and then retraining the AI for the image look to generate the final result. That is all doable but it takes time to do (and to do right). Stay tuned.

Hi @BorisTheBlade, just a question on how the team at Indigo goes about setting image quality?  As you are probably aware of that most OEM stock cameras are based on machine learning/AI models and that tends to be a hit and miss, except with Apple being the most consistent of all when it comes to color sciences, hdr and white balance across all lenses.  The HDR is the most LTM for all of the OEM with the obvious halo glowing edges, and faux skies color of skies being cyan vs that true lavender blu/dark blue in the cities area due to light pollutions etc..  Speaking in regards to the JPEG of course.  Lately, Oppo and Vivo has set new image boundaries with the way their tunings are due to their own custom imaging chips making those high frequency details very natural vs the clumps details or worms like seen.

 

Also with iOS it's very limited at proper third party apps so I'm guessing comparing to them is kind of pointless since most of them aren't properly done and mainly uses proRAW pipelines.   Do you guys base the jpeg tuning against a database of images done from like dslrs, different OEMs, or how are the baseline established?

By @nhan_8084

We are not using any 3rd party information whatsoever. Since we control most of the end-to-end capture and processing pipeline, we capture our own raws with iPhones, using our AE, then we edit them the way we like, and that is in the ML model training set. That is for the "look" (i.e., tone and color rendition of the image). Other things like noise and sharpness are a bit more involved and are a mix of traditional and AI-based technologies. As always, the problem is to find a balance since if you optimize for one use case, you'll make another worse. Which is why IQ changes usually take a long time to happen, and are often done in very small increments after a lot of testing has been done with a huge variety of scenes. Even for companies such as Apple, which has probably more than 1000 people working on the camera stack (HW, SW, firmware, algorithms) it can take years to introduce meaningful changes to image quality tuning.

@BorisTheBlade Hi

 

just wanted to check its been weeks not days since Iphone17 release 😄

 

do we have an update please

By @youthful_gift5432

17-series bringup is in progress. It takes time because we need to recalibrate many parameters of the processing pipeline due to small but impactful changes in ultrawide and wide cameras, there is a brand new telephoto that needs tuning, and the front camera is very different from anything Apple has released in the past... so we have our hands full. Thank you for the patience.

Thank you for developing this app. I recently upgraded from 16pro Max to 17pro Max. I found that I can't use indigo. I haven't taken photos for more than a week (the sharpening of the iOS camera makes me unable to arouse interest). Please support the 17 series quickly, please. . Another question: Can a switch about HDR be set for framing and photo preview? Hdr preview/shooting not only consumes power for me, but also has to press and hold the mobile phone screen to switch to sdr every time I look at photos (of course, hdr also has many benefits, so I wonder if I can add a corresponding switch?), thank you!

By @enthusiastic_critic1623

iPhone 17-series support is coming. Apple made some significant changes to the front camera so that is taking more time, but we are making steady progress on it. Regarding SDR/HDR switch, we are looking into it. That is not as trivial of a question, depending on the workflow users want after capture, but once we have a solution we are satisfied with we will share an update.

I have a question about indigo please. I've been using this on an iPhone 16 and results on the phone are so good I've started to use it as my default camera but have now come up against a problem which I can't resolve. When I transfer the dng file to my Mac and do some further processing the dng file looks as I want it. But when I export this file into tif and jpg formats the quality deteriorates enormously and the file is no longer useable. This may have been dealt with before but I can't resolve this and will have to revert to using the iPhone camera instead. I've tried changing the colour space to all other options but nothing works. Any solutions?

By @David33480628bb2n

Hi David - thanks for reaching out. I will need some more information in order to be able to help:

• Which software are you using for editing DNGs?
• What kind of TIFF/JPEG are you trying to export (SDR, HDR)?
• What kind of monitor are you editing and viewing these files to verify they work well or not?

Apparently according to the user in this post, Photoshop Elements 2025 with Camera Raw installed will not open the dng files from Project Indigo.

My first thought is HDR in Project Indigo was used and that's the reason, but still waiting for user response.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-elements-discussions/dng-files-from-project-indigo-won-t-open-in-pse2025-editor-from-camera-raw-addin/td-p/15528091

By @Jeff Arola

Thank you Jeff for alerting me to this - I am following up with the Elements team.

JPEG photos synced by Microsoft OneDrive are given the file extension .heic. The data in the files are still the same and doing a checksum comparison with the same photos synced by iCloud confirms this. 

By @chubby_puppy

Thank you for sharing. That is some OneDrive weirdness... we'll try it out but it would be on Microsoft to fix this issue. 

It looks like the forum's built-in preview only loads the SDR base, but if you download the JPGs, the HDR gainmaps are embedded.

Please explain what is happeining to the faces of the artists.  I'm using an iPhone 16 Pro Max.  This is about a 5x-8x on the camera.  There is a lot of distortion. I was shooting in manual mode, the screen shot is taken from LR.  This is the reason that I want to use indigo.  I like to shoot in manual mode.  Thx, Steve

By @steves75674135

Hi Steve - thank you for sharing these. This is a decently low light scene with moving subjects, and it looks like the algorithm for aligning and merging multiple frames to reduce noise is merging some pixels it shouldn't. I will pass these results to the team and we'll work on tuning the algorithm further. It does get tricky however because each individual frame is quite noisy (ISO is high and exposure is fast at 1/800), and merging such frames creates a problem of differentiating between signal and noise.