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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
May 23, 2025
401 replies
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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

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A

andre_2260

Participating Frequently

Dear fellows! 🙂
please please stop asking Boris about the iPhone 17 update! He told us a million times that exactly this is the thing the whole team is working on as fast as possible! Answering the same iPhone 17 questions 10 times a day won't make it faster (if something then slower ;)).
don't get me wrong I am as keen to see the update as you are! But we want a good release and won't change a thing if we have it a few days later!
And the last thing we want is that Boris and the team will be annoyed from the community they are doing the stuff for 🙂

So hold tight guys! 🙂

and If I am right, Even the higher resolution option (24mp/48mp) So often demanded from us Is a concern to the team and will be addressed in near futur.

keep Going with your incredible app!

edit: ups I posted this as an answer which was not intended! This was ment to us all 🙂

E

enthusiastic_critic1623

Participating Frequently

Yes, they just released an update to version 1.0.4 and fixed some bugs.

A

andre_2260

Participating Frequently

As written several times before, it's unlikely that older systems will receive support. it's even possible that iOS 18 will be legacy soon because iOS 26 change quite a few things which increases the quality of processing. so thinking about stopping usage on 18 will make it extremely unlikely to support iOS 15.

E

enthusiastic_critic1623

Participating Frequently

Hi there,
Hope you're well.
I'm the user who previously enquired about the iPhone 17 compatibility for your app. I was very grateful for your response, and I was pleased to hear that a fix was in the pipeline.
I just wanted to follow up and see how things are coming along. It's been about three weeks now, and I'm still keen to get back to using your app on my new device.
Any update on the progress would be much appreciated.
Many thanks

A

andre_2260

Participating Frequently

Dear fellows!
please please stop asking Boris about the iPhone 17 update! He told us a million times that exactly this is the thing the whole team is working on as fast as possible! Answering the same iPhone 17 questions 10 times a day won't make it faster (if something then slower ;)).
don't get me wrong I am as keen to see the update as you are! But we want a good release and won't change a thing if we have it a few days later!
And the last thing we want is that Boris and the team will be annoyed from the community they are doing the stuff for 🙂

So hold tight guys! 🙂

and If I am right, Even the higher resolution option (24mp/48mp) So often demanded from us Is a concern to the team and will be addressed in near futur.

keep Going with your incredible app!

P

polyoinos

Participant

Thanxalot for this project which I use more and more.
Or "used" – since the app does not function on my new iPhone 17 Pro Max. Can you say when it will do so?
All the best
Frank

G

garry_7239

Participant

One feature that I would like to see is the ability for the user to create any frame size that want, eg 6:17 to square, but ideally unconstrained.

In addition the out of frame areas can be selected to be black or transparent, seeing the image behind, but at a reduced opacity.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

One feature that I would like to see is the ability for the user to create any frame size that want, eg 6:17 to square, but ideally unconstrained.

In addition the out of frame areas can be selected to be black or transparent, seeing the image behind, but at a reduced opacity.

By @garry_7239

An arbitrary aspect ratio is an interesting idea, though it does raise some concerns around quality testing and deciding how to define the allowable limits. We are going to add the most commonly used aspect ratios soon (1:1, 3:2, 16:9) and once that is tried and tested we can see whether and how we'd extend that.

M

Moonboots22

Participating Frequently

The 1.0.3 update mentioned a feature about the mirroring in the front facing camera. Is there any way to flip the resulting image (so text isn't backwards on a shirt, for instance), from the app rather than having to load the photo into Lightroom, do it there, and export?

S

steves75674135

Known Participant

I'm not sure this is the thread where I should ask this.. If I upgrade myi Phone 16 Pro Max to OS 26 whil Indigo still work on my phone?? Thx, Steve

mopperle

Inspiring

at least it works under iOS26 on my iPhone 13Pro

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Hi @BorisTheBlade, could you provide the current work status on the iPhone 17 series? The question is not meant to be a means to rush the team by any means, but I always love to get the insights on development status to know and learn.

E

enthusiastic_critic1623

Participating Frequently

same question 🙂

I

Incredible_Everglow8050

Participant

I just started on my iPhone14Pro with PI.

Today I shot 15 JPEG+DNG.

I imported the DNG in Darktable 5.2.1

Only 6 of them were correct imported in Darktable 5.2.1.

The other 9 were "unknown fromat".

I attached one good and one bad.

AFAICS the smaller is not correct. The lager ones are correct.

(Attachments were not accepted :"

The attachment's 2510060942-projectindigo-009.dng content type (application/octet-stream) does not match its file extension and has been removed.
The attachment's 2510060941-projectindigo-008.dng content type (application/octet-stream) does not match its file extension and has been removed."

Please help.

Grz. Paul

K

kmilos

Participating Frequently

IMHO this is still related to https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-ecosystem-cloud-based-discussions/p-introducing-the-project-indigo-camera-app/m-p/15378279#M104384

Don't know if this was addressed in 1.0.3

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

@kmilos there is indeed an issue with cropping metadata; this is in a bucket of DNG-related things we are fixing, and is WIP. This is also possibly what is impacting Darktable being able to read things in @Incredible_Everglow8050 . Funny enough, I am well acquainted with the project founder of Darktable - happy to see it being mentioned in the wild and actively used. 🙂

E

eduardo_4596

Participant

As you develop for the newest lineups for iPhone and I presume just like every 3rd party developer not just talking about photo and video app but all third party app included that they would use TestFlight to run beta App on devices to test internally or externally to a few people. For example I am currently in the Halide 2.0 beta through TestFlight since the app is subscription model and gave access to those who is able to join a handful through a TestFlight link and as a result were able to directly provide feedback within the TestFlight App on iOS

Have you thought of using Indigio as you can constantly making changes of using TestFlight on iOS so iOS users who are open to download and join the beta App to test and provide feedback? I would love to join if there is plans to do this as person who is passionate about helping third party app developers to make app more better.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

As you develop for the newest lineups for iPhone and I presume just like every 3rd party developer not just talking about photo and video app but all third party app included that they would use TestFlight to run beta App on devices to test internally or externally to a few people. For example I am currently in the Halide 2.0 beta through TestFlight since the app is subscription model and gave access to those who is able to join a handful through a TestFlight link and as a result were able to directly provide feedback within the TestFlight App on iOS

Have you thought of using Indigio as you can constantly making changes of using TestFlight on iOS so iOS users who are open to download and join the beta App to test and provide feedback? I would love to join if there is plans to do this as person who is passionate about helping third party app developers to make app more better.

By @eduardo_4596

Thank you for your interest in helping test Indigo. We are using TestFlight for internal development, of course, but we haven't thought about running a public "beta". Note that Indigo is pretty extreme as it is, and we consider it experimental, so... a TestFlight "beta" would be "even more experimental".... that doesn't sound quite right. 🙂 Most importantly, since we are digging deep into the iOS API stack for camera control, CoreML framework for AI features, etc., many things in our internal builds are quite unstable and "broken" until they hit an inflection point and it suddently all starts to work. We will try to have a public release soon after such inflection points, so a public beta really doesn't help much in that scenario. If Indigo is productized in the future and stops being experimental, then a public beta will make more sense.

W

WillSnaps

Participating Frequently

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

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.

photopoeth

Inspiring

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.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.

photopoeth

Inspiring

@9123851 Thanks for the feedback. I understand...

I think there are two sides to this: on the one hand, it's about getting the most “perfect” black-and-white image possible, but on the other hand, it's about a rather “dumb” B&W preview to better see while you're framing the shot.

I was mainly concerned with the latter, because with the IR filter, the images are deep red, which makes photography really difficult. BR

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