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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
May 23, 2025
362 replies
233159 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

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pmattos92

Participant

Thank you to the team working on this app, it's so refreshing to see an app that leans even more on computational photography instead of less like so many other apps do. I love the app and am very excited to see what the next updates will bring! I have a few suggestions/feature requests and one question.

It's currently very hard to nail focus when adjusting it manually. It would be really helpful if the app had green/yellow/red focus peaking to help with that.
When shooting in auto mode, it's hard to get both the appropriate focus and exposure right as similarly to the native Camera app, tapping on the screen will set both at the same time. I would love it if tap to focus and set exposure could be separated (possibly with a setting to control this behaviour), allowing me to tap to set both, and then drag out only the exposure or focus to another area on the screen. Check out ProCamera's interface for a great example of this. This would help me nail both settings 99% of the time and not even need to resort to manual mode.
Eposure compensation should be easier to access. This is a frequently used setting, even in auto mode, to justify it being easily accessible without having to go into the manual settings menu. I would suggest moving the "Photo/Night" mode toggle to the side, and putting the "+/-" button front and center right above the shutter button. Again, look at ProCamera's different interface modes for great examples on how to solve this.
If this app is going to rely so heavily on computational photography to the point of overheating most modern phones, a setting should be added to let us choose how much computation we actually want. You don't need to expose the exact parameters or optimizations used behvind the scenes, but just let me choose between 2 or 3 presets that customize how intensive the processing will be. Phrasing this in terms of what trade-offs could be expected could help communicate what each setting entails. Something like "Speed ----- Balanced ----- Quality" – where Quality would be the existing processing that tends to overheat phones, and the other two could be less intensive versions of that, with other priorities in mind.

Question

On that last note, like many people, my only "problem" with the app is how hot my iPhone 16 Pro gets when using it. This makes the whole experience poor, as it either gets uncomfortably hot to hold or the app will just start freezing under heavy load. While my suggestion above is one way I think this could be addressed in the future, I have found a workaround that works with the current version of the app, and wanted to check if this is a viable solution, in your opinion: I found that when I turn on "Low Power Mode" in the iOS Battery settings, the app will make my iPhone significantly less hot during use. This is expected, as Low Power Mode will, among other things, restrict processing and turn off the HDRness of the display in order to use less battery power. This also inevitably means the app will take a little longer to process the final shots, but I would say it's an overall better experience while using it. So my question is: does running the app with Low Power Mode turned on cause the app to compromise on the quality of the captured photos in any way? I think this is a viable workaround until the app can be optimized to not overheat most phones, or until chips get more powerful to run it without any issues, BUT I will only rely on it if that means there's no compromise on the quality of the output.

Thank you again for your attention to the feedback shared here, and for making this awesome app!

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

By @pmattos92

Thank you for sharing detailed observations and suggestions. I'll do my best to comment or answer your questions:

Getting manual focus right is tricky, I fully agree. The "focus peaking" feature you are mentioning is nee impossible to implement well. Basically, it is impossible to detect "peak sharpness" of a pixel or image region from a single image. You would need to analize the same scene but with multiple images, captured with focus shifting (i.e., a focus stack). Furthermore, this would heavily depend on the amount of noise in the image signal and zoom level. We tried implementing the feature and doing some quality tuning, but basically it ended up not being precise enough to be useful, which is why we didn't ship it and relied on the focus loupe in Pro controls.
Improving focus and exposure in Auto mode is on our todo list. There are several aspects of it: separating the tap locations for focus and exposure, accounting for the digital zoom (this required changes in iOS which will be available in iOS 26; we will add them then), and adding the exposure compensation slider. All of these are on our roadmap.
As mentioned in #2, we will add EC to Auto mode in one of the upcoming releases.
This is an interesting suggestion. We are working on adding support for user-customizable post-processing parameters, but for computational photography this is for now accessible from the Pro Controls. Namely, in Night Mode, the last Pro Control on the right exposes the Frames To Merge slider: the fewer frames one uses, the faster processing will be, and vice versa. We can think about some more high-level app setting, but in truth, with Indigo we are trying to push the limits of computational photography and of iPhone hardware. We have quite a few additional optimizations to try which may limit or negate the need for customizing the amount of computational photography.

Regarding your question, low power mode should not compromize the quality of Indigo captures much, if at all. There may be some impact however, primarily with Zero Shutter Lag captures in Photo mode, where the rate of raw frames the app is able to get from the OS may go down. If there are fast moving scenes, there may be fewer frames to merge, resulting in noisier captures. Other than that, note that in low power mode your display will not show HDR properly, so images may not look good until you disable the low power mode.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

By @pmattos92

Regarding your question, low power mode should not compromize the quality of Indigo captures much, if at all. There may be some impact however, primarily with Zero Shutter Lag captures in Photo mode, where the rate of raw frames the app is able to get from the OS may go down. If there are fast moving scenes, there may be fewer frames to merge, resulting in noisier captures. Other than that, note that in low power mode your display will not show HDR properly, so images may not look good until you disable the low power mode.

Clarifying the low power mode a bit. Regarding ZSL capture, we suspect there may be impact on the frame rate of raw frames we may get from the system, but that is not confirmed. In reality, there may be no impact. And on the HDR side of things, the captured images will be processed just the same, it's just that the OS will disable the HDR display output (as it consumes a lot of power) so the images will temporarily look poorer. If you disable low power mode, then those same images will look just fine.

leed24280355

Participating Frequently

If I use Indigo to take a DNG+JPG and then use LR Mobile to import the images, it will only import the DNGs. The JPGs are not imported to LR Mobile. Is there anyway to ensure that both versions are imported or can this be added as a feature to LR Mobile? I have the same issue when trying to import DNG+JPG pairs created by other apps (such as Halide).

My workaround is to open each DNG+JPG in Apple Photos and use the share option to Edit in Lightroom. That then brings the JPG into LR Mobile but this has to be done one image at a time, which is cumbersome.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

If I use Indigo to take a DNG+JPG and then use LR Mobile to import the images, it will only import the DNGs. The JPGs are not imported to LR Mobile. Is there anyway to ensure that both versions are imported or can this be added as a feature to LR Mobile? I have the same issue when trying to import DNG+JPG pairs created by other apps (such as Halide).

My workaround is to open each DNG+JPG in Apple Photos and use the share option to Edit in Lightroom. That then brings the JPG into LR Mobile but this has to be done one image at a time, which is cumbersome.

By @leed24280355

Thank you for sharing this. Typically users want to import only one of the two, which is why Lightroom for mobile focuses on the DNG workflow. Having said that, one way to speed importing JPEGs is to multi-select several images in Apple Photos and then share with Lightroom. This way, all of them will be shared in one go, instead of going one by one.

leed24280355

Participating Frequently

Actually, if I take concurrent DNG+JPG images, I usually want to import both. I often do this so I can compare the DNG to the JPG to see how good (or not) the JPGs are. With a real camera you can often shoot RAW + JPG at the same time and LR or LRC enables you to import both side by side. So it would be really cool if LRM could add this as an option.

I know of one app for iPhone that names the RAW and JPG slightly differently and in this case they appear as seperate files to LRM.

Lee

leed24280355

Participating Frequently

There is a bug whereby if you Reset Edits in LR on an Indigo DNG, the Profile changes from 'Indigo' to 'Adobe Color'. I was hoping that this would be fixed in the latest LR 8.5. Is this a bug that needs a change to LR to fix or is it an issue with the DNG that needs an update of Indigo to fix?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

There is a bug whereby if you Reset Edits in LR on an Indigo DNG, the Profile changes from 'Indigo' to 'Adobe Color'. I was hoping that this would be fixed in the latest LR 8.5. Is this a bug that needs a change to LR to fix or is it an issue with the DNG that needs an update of Indigo to fix?

By @leed24280355

This is a bit of a tricky question, as there are several versions of the DNG that could be used when the user wants to reset. Two most important ones are a version as intended by the camera (i.e., with the Indigo profile and with other rendering preferences set by the camera), and what the user's default rendering settings are. So when you click on 'Reset' the system cannot know which version you want to see. That is why there are several resetting options in ACR and Lightroom like "Reset to Default" and "Reset to Open". A recommendation when editing is to save versions, so you can always go back to a version that is meaningful to you. Others on the forum may have more helpful suggestions.

leed24280355

Participating Frequently

I am using the cloud version of LR on a Mac and the option is under the menu option Photo/Reset Edits, which is supposed to reset the photo to how it was on import. If you do that on an Indigo DNG, the profile will change to 'Adobe Color'.

I have just realised that, at that point if you do Edit/Undo Reset Edits, it will switch the profile back to the Indigo one.

R

realrev_

Participant

Here I want to share the night scene that my friend took in Japan. The Indigo camera is really great.

However, the problem is that sometimes it takes a quiet long time to open, or even just freezes. This problem has only recently occurred on my iPhone 16 pro max.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Here I want to share the night scene that my friend took in Japan. The Indigo camera is really great.

However, the problem is that sometimes it takes a quiet long time to open, or even just freezes. This problem has only recently occurred on my iPhone 16 pro max.

By @realrev_

This is a very nice photo - thank you for sharing! Regarding the app seemingly slowing down, a couple of questions: did you by any chance update your OS on the device? We have noticed issues with some iOS 26 beta versions (e.g., beta 6), so that could be a part of it. Second question is whether you rebooted your device recently? It can help sometimes. If the issue persist please reach out again and we'll debug further.

R

realrev_

Participant

Hi Boris,

Thank you for getting back to me.

My device is currently on the latest iOS 18; I haven’t tried iOS 26 yet.

After rebooting my device, the issue has disappeared.

It is worth mentioning that the Indigo camera can produce some degree of purple fringing when photographing subjects with clearly defined edges, which can be rather bothersome in photography. That said, as someone who has been using Leica digital cameras for over a decade as a hobby, I remain very satisfied with the Indigo.

Best wishes

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade I took a 2x SR and 10x SR on a scene with foliages to see how it handles fine details and I noticed some weird things. Either the merge didn't align right, or the fill AI didn't apply right bc there seems to be random radial blurring like faux bokeh look. Almost like bad portrait mode bokeh. I will attach raws for inspection, the SOOC jpeg, and crops of the issue place in lrm.

heres the 2x raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vhka3jbknfc2hop0bl04w/IMG_9513.dng?rlkey=sg4ht215fnxepzs3knqjehnva&st=wyo5rr47&dl=0

here's the 10x raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5adm0dma9uzumqc5jib26/IMG_9518.dng?rlkey=0fr27v0ipw8ns1ejdrtwm18v5&st=aaibex6y&dl=0

Edit: Forgot to add that the 1x, 2x processing took approximately 6-7s after shutter pressed. Could this be improved upon?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade I took a 2x SR and 10x SR on a scene with foliages to see how it handles fine details and I noticed some weird things. Either the merge didn't align right, or the fill AI didn't apply right bc there seems to be random radial blurring like faux bokeh look. Almost like bad portrait mode bokeh. I will attach raws for inspection, the SOOC jpeg, and crops of the issue place in lrm.

By @nhan_8084

Foliage is notoriously challenging, because it is very high frequency content which is rarely static. Together with camera shake, alignment errors are hard to avoid. This is a high priority image quality improvement for the team, so we'll be working on improving the results in the upcoming releases.

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade That is awesome to hear that it is high priority 🙂 I went back and edited the post to mention about slow processing time, please re-look if you didn't happen to see it while you responded.

oskar27

Participating Frequently

I've looked, but haven't found my question/answer. How do I prevent Night Mode from turning my night photos into "day"? What adjustments I should make, and can I make them defaults?

G

gregbenz

Inspiring

If you mean that the exposure is too high, just being down exposure in the
LR edit. A brighter capture (without clipping) is always ideal to reduce
noise in the capture, but may be too bright artistically without darkening
in post.

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

Took a nice sunset photo today and attached the raw here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nk7i0ptjwko825htwn3on/IMG_9503.dng?rlkey=gjdh23t1bpvuc52j5679r5uua&st=7o22s1ej&dl=0

There are some moire seen in the attached crops, along with grid like artifacts that is most likely related to the lines artifacts you mentioned before in my samples @BorisTheBlade . Is it possible to lessen the moire remosaic?

I also attached the final post processed jpeg in hdr.

A

ambitious_Explorer5534

Participant

When will the application update be released?

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

When will the application update be released?

By @ambitious_Explorer5534

An updated version of Indigo is in the works. I cannot share an exact timeline, but we are aiming to make the next release quite big in terms of improvements made to the app, with the accent on addressing the most common complaints from our users shared so far. Please stay tuned.

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade I came across the Greg Benz photography blog and saw an article he posted about gainmaps vs tonemapping here: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-photos/gain-maps-vs-tone-mapping-hdr/ . So I noticed as mentioned with the moon shot example that Indigo's raw tends to default to HDR editing vs normal editing of raw (non-HDR). Since most social media websites, and browsers as mentioned by Greg do not have the capability to display HDR content even when viewed on a HDR screen such as our phones, it seems like we need to always edit using non-hdr mode in LRM correct? I say this because when I viewed a picture sent to facebook messenger, it displayed a very weird over-hdr looks vs the proper hdr viewing in google photos, Indigo's film strip viewer, or apple photos app. Does Indigo have a built in gain map to have it properly display in non-hdr monitors, social media apps like Greg mentioned or it's just because editing with HDR in LRM will give you improper results on non-HDR apps/monitors? Thanks!

G

gregbenz

Inspiring

@nhan_8084 If you shoot RAW (DNG) with the app, you can simply choose the HDR mode or not in LRM. HDR looks amazing and I would use it if you have the screen for editing and share images on your own website or other places where you can ensure the HDR is retained. When you export the image as a JPG gain map, it will adapt to look great on any display (even those with limited or no HDR support). To do that, choose "maximize compatibility" (or JPG w/ gain map if you are exporting with my Web Sharp Pro plugin for Photoshop).

If you capture with JPG in Indigo, it is making a gain map and already has an SDR base image.

So either way, HDR is safe and can offer significant benefits. The issue you would see in my link is when HDR is shared without a gain map.

J

jrsforums

Inspiring

Will LRc jpegs automatically contain gain maps or does one need to adjust settings to get them?

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

So I wanted to try out max 25x handheld on the moon, and the result is just incredible! I have never able to take the moon like this with any app, even stock app. The attached picture is manual setting iso, shutter and focus. Raw processed to jpeg. @BorisTheBlade There are some weird lines as mentioned before when I showed 10x in motion object, and eventhough handheld is tad shakey vs tripod, it still exists but not bad! I disabled Indigo's profile and went with Adobe Standard as well. I am truely truely shocked that the small periscope sensor can even do this. This is not the work of AI or ML from Indigo right? If so I don't mind bc it is just outstanding! I cannot wait for what Indigo has in store once the periscope gets to 48mp, even if binned, the sensor will be much larger.

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade could you please respond to my questions here?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade could you please respond to my questions here?

By @nhan_8084

Multi-frame super-resolution is indeed done with AI. But it is not the kind of AI that hallucinates (i.e., it's not Generative AI). Instead, it uses natural handshake motion of the camera to fill in the missing detail. This can work only IF the lens resolution is higher than the sensor resolution. If the lens is diffraction limited, then there is no extra resolution to be recovered this way, so multi-frame super-resolution may bring much in terms of detail improvements. You will notice that, generally speaking, 2x zoom on Indigo is better than 10x zoom. That is because 2x camera is much, much sharper than the 5x one.

The lines you are seeing are artifacts in image processing, which happen sometimes, more so with moving objects. The ML model doesn't hallucinate, but may make a mistake like that. We'll work on minimizing those.

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