P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Known Participant

is there a possibility to do lossless dng compression like on the pixels gcam? I find it very space hogging after processing dng to jpeg, they all get around 20mb range for a jpeg! I was hoping for half of that since it's only 12mp raws like in google camera dng to jpeg. I think compression for jpeg is 95% and raw was lossless compression in google camera.

For the pixel, the raw on 12mp is about 14-18mb, importing to lightroom mobile, killing all sharp and denoise and exporting to jpeg is about 6mb vs the usually 15-20mb I normally see from Indigo in all lighting conditions.

Adobe Employee

is there a possibility to do lossless dng compression like on the pixels gcam? I find it very space hogging after processing dng to jpeg, they all get around 20mb range for a jpeg! I was hoping for half of that since it's only 12mp raws like in google camera dng to jpeg. I think compression for jpeg is 95% and raw was lossless compression in google camera.

For the pixel, the raw on 12mp is about 14-18mb, importing to lightroom mobile, killing all sharp and denoise and exporting to jpeg is about 6mb vs the usually 15-20mb I normally see from Indigo in all lighting conditions.

By @nhan_8084

Indigo already uses lossless DNG compression and JPEG output at 95% quality setting. I am not sure what workflow you are talking about here: are you importing a DNG into Lightroom, editing, then exporting as JPEG and ending up with a large file?

Known Participant

Hi @BorisTheBlade , yes when comparing to raw from google camera dng exporting to jpeg via light room mobile, Indigo's exported jpeg is always double the size of the google camera's jpeg. I usually test this by just sliding the sharpening slider, and all noise reduction sliders to 0 then just export 100% quality in jpeg. However since you said it is already lossless and at 95% jpeg then that is great.

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WillSnaps

Participating Frequently

This might be an interesting development for Indigo: the iPhone 17 Pro has a new video "ProRes RAW" video mode, the 17 Pro didn't have this! I wonder if Indigo video could do more and have more freedom with this? Things like a video night mode maybe?

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WillSnaps

Participating Frequently

Gah, I meant to say the 16 Pro doesn't have ProRes RAW. ProRes RAW is new for the 17 Pro

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade What happened with the app updates? You said it is coming in the upcoming weeks? Also i hope app performance is greatly improved and heat since this update took almost 3 months.

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade What happened with the app updates? You said it is coming in the upcoming weeks? Also i hope app performance is greatly improved and heat since this update took almost 3 months.

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

A new build is imminent. Having said that, there are a few things to be aware of here:

Indigo is experimental, and there is no commitment (yet) from Adobe on productizing it. So all effort that goes in it is due to a passionate, but rather small team working on it.
As menioned above, we are a small team. Depending on what an app does one doesn't necessarily need a big team, but Indigo is complex so things take time.
Did I mention that Indigo is complex? Indeed, since we own the full image capture and processing pipeline, making changes is oftentimes a lot more involved than if we were to "just" reuse Apple's capture pipeline. For many 3rd party camera apps adding certain features is really just a bit of UI/UX work. For us it may require that plus a decent amount of messing about with the core capture and processing functionality.
Furthermore, building on the 'experimental' label from above, as we are building Indigo, we often find that the way we did some things initially is suboptimal and may make things slower for the user, or it may make building extensions harder. So we are changing quite a few things under-the-hood which you may not notice any gains from, but which will allow us to do things better or faster later.

The team really appreciates the support we are getting from the community, especially here on the forum. We are accutely aware that Indigo has some sore spots that need fixing or improving, and the main one are stability and performance. These will be coming out to our users over time, and the next update already includes some such improvements - for example, I can tease that we managed to improve the super-resolution speed without impacting image quality. Stay tuned for more.

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djskinner50

Known Participant

I feel your pain. Having been involved in bringing large format digital printing systems to market when the technology was new and a bit flaky at times, it needs patience from that part of the customer base which is willing to see the benefits of the new technology and live with its early foibles and, importantly, help the developers with constructive feedback and encouragement.

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carromdc

Participating Frequently

I love the images from the app, they're amazing. I notice that ewhen i view the images on iphone there is a slight pause then it seems like the lights turn on. What's happening? Can i print the lights on image?

Adobe Employee

I love the images from the app, they're amazing. I notice that ewhen i view the images on iphone there is a slight pause then it seems like the lights turn on. What's happening? Can i print the lights on image?

By @carromdc

Hello - I am not sure I understand what you are experiencing with the lights turning on. Would you mind explaining a bit more?

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liyuu_8951

Participant

Hi guys,

Loving Project Indigo so far. Thanks for building this! I want to share a minor issue I've experienced with the app.

I’m using a Japanese-model iPhone and a shutter / notification sound is required when taking photos in Japan (or when the device is in Airplane Mode). However, in Project Indigo the shutter sound plays continuously—even when I’m not pressing the shutter button. This constant sound makes it very hard to take photos in public without disturbing others.

Could you please look into this for a fix or workaround? Thank again for building a great app.

Adobe Employee

I’m using a Japanese-model iPhone and a shutter / notification sound is required when taking photos in Japan (or when the device is in Airplane Mode). However, in Project Indigo the shutter sound plays continuously—even when I’m not pressing the shutter button. This constant sound makes it very hard to take photos in public without disturbing others.

By @liyuu_8951

Thank you for reaching out. This is a known issue, due to the fact that Indigo's viewfinder always streams raw frames which are used both for our custom auto-exposure algorithm and for our Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL) functionality. We are working with Apple on trying to enable shutter sound disabling world wide. Please stay tuned.

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karen_5438

Participant

I have been using Indigo from the start and it became my main camera app (mapped it to camera button)

the main differentiator from stock camera app is color rendition wchi feels much more natural, film-like, less flat and processed. The image has much more plasticity!

Attached few recent pictures (all are straight unprocessed jpegs)

p.s. still waiting for pure astophotography mode

Adobe Employee

I have been using Indigo from the start and it became my main camera app (mapped it to camera button)

the main differentiator from stock camera app is color rendition wchi feels much more natural, film-like, less flat and processed. The image has much more plasticity!

Attached few recent pictures (all are straight unprocessed jpegs)

p.s. still waiting for pure astophotography mode

By @karen_5438

Thank you for sharing your images - these all look wonderful! Regarding improvements to long exposure functionality, including the astrophotography mode, these are in progress. It will take a few cycles for us to progressively add more, as astrophotography requires custom processing which differs from regular captures. Stay tuned!

Antonis R

Inspiring

Indigo was a very promising camera app until a few days ago when it stopped writing DNG files.

I tried erasing / downloading Indigo again, tried quitting Indigo then shooting RAW with the native Apple app then back to Indigo. Always wait for the little progress circle over the preview to complete before doing anything else. No quick clicks of the shutter. No overheating.

Nothing has restored DNG functionality (while Indigo is obviously set to DNG+JPG).

Indigo 1.0.2 on iPhone 16 pro / iOS 18.6.2 / available 81 GB / no previous photos saved in Photos / iCloud not used for Photos.

It should be obvious that not having access to DNG files has made Indigo rather useless.

Adobe Employee

Indigo was a very promising camera app until a few days ago when it stopped writing DNG files.

I tried erasing / downloading Indigo again, tried quitting Indigo then shooting RAW with the native Apple app then back to Indigo. Always wait for the little progress circle over the preview to complete before doing anything else. No quick clicks of the shutter. No overheating.

Nothing has restored DNG functionality (while Indigo is obviously set to DNG+JPG).

Indigo 1.0.2 on iPhone 16 pro / iOS 18.6.2 / available 81 GB / no previous photos saved in Photos / iCloud not used for Photos.

It should be obvious that not having access to DNG files has made Indigo rather useless.

By @Antonis R

Hi Antonis, this is indeed concerning, but it also sounds very weird - I can honestly say this is the first time I am hearing of this problem. To debug this further, can you answer a couple of additional questions:

If you capture JPEG-only, is it always saved correctly?
If you capture JPEG+DNG, is the JPEG always saved correctly?
How are you verifying that the DNG is or isn't written to disk?
Have you tried rebooting the device to see if that helps?

Thank you for helping to triage this.

Known Participant

Here's another night mode auto shot in quite dim lighting. There is only one street light not in frame to the right. It took 1s to proccess and I am extremely impressed at what it does in terms of raw! The shadows can be recovered quite well, if pushed all the way up the dark areas noises both chroma and luma are not blotchy artifacts like previous since it didn't need to drop shutter speed much unlike the other scene. The sooc jpeg did fine in terms of exposure on how it represents the true darkness of that scene, but too much crushing shadows.

The processed jpeg from raw is how I would like night mode to behave vs currently as that look is more zsl instead of psl, which night mode tends to be brighter and have more shadow exposure. I also removed all denoising in light room mobile and left sharpening untouched. This amount of noise if done to sooc jpeg is more than acceptable due to the nature of the scene darkness. Please pass this to the team and see what they think as well in terms of noise to sharpness.

night mode raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i4qoqwj3h2uen0mei6pqm/IMG_0014.dng?rlkey=25rq19knl4at8netsz1y3bnpo&st=tlgpxk67&dl=0

Indigo raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ueva2i4mcbz6nq6vqe49k/IMG_9994.dng?rlkey=sybu0e3vyy1r1zc2p94zalzwz&st=10uwv4py&dl=0

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade Last night I took a night mode Indigo raw for the first time just to see how it does handheld. Everything was left on auto upon entering night mode. The result is pretty decent but there are rooms for improvement of course as always. It took 4s animation based on the counter to do it's merge and process. In lightroom mobile, it's quite amazing to push the shadow up about the midpoint of the slider before you get any strange artifacts. Pushing it to almost max gives weird chroma noise/blobs/ whatever you call it in the shadows/black areas. I do not know what is the cause of this or to even call it. But as you see the noise patterns are fine grains elsewhere, which is fine, can the shadows/black areas be this fine grains in the future vs whatever it is now shown? I have attached the crops as well as the raw.

I spoke to you before in regards to having always DCG on for whatever sensor is capable of in the 15 pro series and upwards since the sensor "should" be capable of dual conversion gain. I have attached two example of a extremely hard case shot inside a restaurant with hdr. One shot is taken with DCG enabled raw from google camera 9.6 with my own tuning adjustments for google camera, and one shot is from Indigo raw. All was auto. As you can see the dcg raw from google camera is far better in terms of shadow noise recovery vs the normal raw. Having DCG on always will also aid in the night shot mentioned above as well. Let me know what you think after digressing into these raw samples.

Dcg raw from google camera 9.6 mods: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vimbaizmsqfetaa8dgtd3/Gcam9.6_DCG.dng?rlkey=3spypsi70zm2sbkwqiti0tzq2&st=j4q4n6dx&dl=0

Indigo Nightmode raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2vio2d1pqb849j28gh95l/IMG_9993.dng?rlkey=yllxxfoscrjkm5qt8kublcv0p&st=0a6yhau1&dl=0

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red0ne

Participant

I just registered to express my gratitude and support to the team. I’ve been using Indigo since release and while it's understandably still maturing, it shows a lot of promise. They are clearly aiming for something that isn't just a repeat of what Marc's team started at Google. I own iPhones and a variety of Android phones to experiment with computational photography, and it's clear Indigo is forging its own path.

Having said that, I would like to share my view as a developer (albeit of the web kind) on the behavior in this thread. It seems to have turned into both: a wishlist (probably fine) and a list of demands for the team to replicate what other camera apps do, which is particularly appalling when specific solutions are prescribed. The team has repeatedly mentioned they are small, so their budget (time, resources, etc.) is limited. Their time is (probably) best spent improving stability (their stated top priority) and executing on their vision, not reproducing the Google camera or emulating the iPhone's ISP.

I bet the best way to get what we want is by helping the team with feedback about specific, reproducible issues. Indigo appears to be an experiment, and its future isn't guaranteed. It needs to be stable and have an identity of its own, which it won’t achieve by copying what came before. This is just my perspective as a lurker who's genuinely excited to see this project succeed.

Known Participant

@red0ne Feedbacks are feedbacks, there's no demands here from me nor anyone on this thread as well. You might have own iPhones and androids like me but you definitely do not know the "scene" of camera mobile photography that exists for example on telegram. Everyone modding camera apps started with google camera as the pinnacle of computational photography and Marc and his team is definitely putting a repeat of that for iOS, not a exact port if that's what you're talking about. Also do know that this is after all Marc's bread and butter so he is definitely improving on what he started with, google camera, so if you can't match the level of google camera and then exceed it, why else Indigo would exists. There's a phlethora of camera app out there already with it's own identity that you mentioned of, but came nowhere close to what google camera is capable of.

Most of the stability feedbacks were overheating, not saving photos if exiting the app too early (my own experience), shutter sounds, improper hdr viewing (udpated in latest iOS beta) seems to be already addressed by the team so the next step would be the obvious fine tune adjustments so people who uses jpeg do not have to tinker with the raws as the raw sizes even after post process to jpeg are quite large, 4-5 times the sizes.

Known Participant

Came across this reddit thread on how Pixel 9 series does zooms @BorisTheBlade : https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1flk1ia/indepth_analysis_of_the_9_pro_camera_at_various/

This was somewhat of what I was trying to ask of Indigo's team regarding to applying SR at various zooms. Please take a look and see if it's even possible for iPhones going forward.

Adobe Employee

Came across this reddit thread on how Pixel 9 series does zooms @BorisTheBlade : https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1flk1ia/indepth_analysis_of_the_9_pro_camera_at_various/

This was somewhat of what I was trying to ask of Indigo's team regarding to applying SR at various zooms. Please take a look and see if it's even possible for iPhones going forward.

By @nhan_8084

We will continue to explore ways to improve zoom quality on Indigo. Since we do not control the HW side of things (unlike Google), we will also need to react to how camera hardware on iPhone develops over time.