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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
May 23, 2025
361 replies
232593 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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jean-michel_3747

Participant

Downloading the DNG file

Boris, thank you for directing me to this gregbenz page, with methods to export DNG files. I tried it and it works. A bit time consuming, but it works.

I first import the pictures in LR on the iPhone, then export them, as DNG files, to Files, where Files is an external SSD. You can use batch processing at every stage, so it doesn’t take such a long time.. And then you can post process the DNG file on a computer with a decent screen, large enough to see what you’re doing, not just the tiny iPhone screen.

Thanks again, jean Michel

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade Hi! Do you think with super res zoom applied on the full image not a crop of a bayer 12mp sensor it can achieve same level of detail and basically reconstruct a 48mp image as a 48mp quad bayer sensor since those sensors have only 12mp of color detail i think they dont provide more real detail and resolution than a bayer 12mp? What do you think? Will this be added to indigo in the future when the processing is optimized?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - technically, yes. We didn't explore that yet given the compute complexity, but will experiment with it and see if there is a way to expose it as an option.

@BorisTheBlade Hi! Do you think with super res zoom applied on the full image not a crop of a bayer 12mp sensor it can achieve same level of detail and basically reconstruct a 48mp image as a 48mp quad bayer sensor since those sensors have only 12mp of color detail i think they dont provide more real detail and resolution than a bayer 12mp? What do you think? Will this be added to indigo in the future when the processing is optimized?

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

S

shanev44310791

Participant

Thoughts on the User Experience of the App

Hi, I have been using Indigo now for a few weeks and here are my thoughts:

1 - Long Exposure should be its own button, not hidden in "night" mode.

2 - There should be an option to shoot DNG only, not just JPG+DNG

3 - Macro Mode needs its own button

To explain each further.

1 - Long Exposure

Maybe I'm a total idiot, but I literaly had to go onto youtube and watch an obscure video of a guy doing Long Exposure, because I could not find it anywhere in the app or on Adobe's own blog. At first I thought it would automatically do it, but eventually I found it. I haven't even tested the mode yet, as I couldn't find it while out near water.

Having Long Exposure under Night Mode is unintuitive. I take Long Exposures day and night, so this is confusing.

2 - DNG Only

I use Lightroom App (which I love). There, LR stores the Raws in the app. I take a few photos and, when I'm satisifed I "got the one", I edit it and then export the JPG to my photos app. From here I share away. However, with Indigo, it's instanlty exporting all my photos to the photo app! This just clogs up the app with duplicates. Then, when I export to LR and adjust, I now have an edited and an unedited photo side by side. This is visualy frustrating, and it means I have to go back and delete everything. Please just give me an option for DNG only - I will then export my favourites to LR for editing.

3 - Macro

When in auto mode there is a button which turns Macro on. Same as the regular app. When in pro mode there is a focus wheel. But it doesn't seem to trigger Macro? I think this might be an Apple Hardware thing, but is there a way to add a Macro button in Pro mode? Or at least tell me if I am in Macro mode on the focus wheel?

Aside from that, it's a nice app. I've gotten pleasing photos and it certainly has a place. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

@shanev44310791 wrote:

Thoughts on the User Experience of the App

Hi, I have been using Indigo now for a few weeks and here are my thoughts:

1 - Long Exposure should be its own button, not hidden in "night" mode.

2 - There should be an option to shoot DNG only, not just JPG+DNG

3 - Macro Mode needs its own button

Hello - thank you for your interest in Indigo and for providing such thoughtful suggestions on improving the app! There is broad agreement on all 3 suggestions, and we will work on adding those to Indigo in future releases.

R

rvm4

Participant

I took two photos today on the 6x setting (iPhone 14 Pro) and both are 3.0 MP. How did this happen?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for reaching out to the team. On 14 Pro, Indigo has multi-frame super-resolution disabled (which kicks in when one uses 2x or more digital zoom), so the final image is obtained by purely cropping the sensor to the center portion. When you capture at 6x zoom, you are using a 3x lens + 2x digital zoom, and in that case for JPEGs we use simple digital upscaling to bring it back to 12MP, but for the DNG we do not. You can enable Burst SR in the app settings, just note that it uses more compute power and may increase thermal issues with the device. We will be continuously working on optimizing our image processing pipeline so that in future releases these issues are minimized.

T

triunfadorazo

Participant

It cold be nice to add and option to show the camera focal lengths in 35mm equivalent, instead the 1x, 2x , 3x... zoom.

D

Dancing_Owl

Participant

Wow! Project Indigo! Excited about what has already been created and more Wow for the future. One issue. I do have the 14Pro so that might be the reason. After a short use I get a device overheating message. Not a good thing if I wanted to use the app for more than a few shots.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying the Indigo camera and for reaching out on the forum. We will continue to optimize Indigo runtime and try to improve the thermal characteristics on supported devices.

M

Moonboots22

Participating Frequently

One recommended UI tweak for the JPEG and JPEG+DNG formats... assuming you stick to two and do not add a third "DNG only" option, make it a toggle rather than a drop down. Right now, it takes two clicks - one of the button, and a second click to select the format - before having the opportunity to take the photo. That additional click can be the difference between getting the shot and missing it.

For the real life example - I shoot a lot of JPEG-only in Project Indigo so far, but sometimes there's a photo to be taken from inside a car or train where the "remove reflection" feature would be an asset. I need to change from JPEG only to the DNG container format in order to access that feature, but the two clicks may take an extra split second to get the shot, where a toggle would only require a single click to swap between JPEG and JPEG+DNG.

If the third file format noted above (DNG only) is on the way, then the drop down menu makes more sense, and this suggestion can be disregarded. Keep up the good work!

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for reaching out to the team. You are correct that it is currently one extra click, but the reason it is implemented this way is both to ensure we can easily add more formats in the future (like a DNG-only capture), as well as to prevent accidental taps. With a single tap to change the format, it is to easy to switch to a format the user does not want by accident and many shooting sessions can pass before the user notices they have the wrong setting.

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Anonymous

Hello,

I took a photo of the moon using the PI app, and it had incredible detail and lighting. But after saving it to my photo album, the image just looks blurry and low quality. I even tried airdropping it directly from the PI app to my laptop, but the result was the same.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello Igor - thank you for reaching out with your question. Can you elaborate more on what the exact use case was and what you are experiencing:

Presumably you captured the moon in Night mode, correct?
Did you use a tripod or have the device securely placed on something like a rock?
Did you use any Pro Controls to set manual settings (e.g., focus), or was the capture fully automatic?
Did you tap to focus on the screen?
Which zoom level did you use?
Did you tap on the shutter button to capture the image or did you set up a 3s timer to ensure the device is steady?
Can you share the image with us for review? Ideally a DNG (which needs to be hosted on a fileshare platform such as DropBox or Google Drive)?

Thank you for helping triage this issue with us!

A

Anonymous

Thank you for your prompt response, Boris. Regarding your question, yes to all of the above. I took the photo in night mode, both with and without zoom, and the phone was stable. All the images look great within the app, but appear noticeably blurrier when viewed in the iPhone photo album. Since I can't show you how the same image looks different in the app versus in the iPhone’s photo album, I’d suggest trying it yourself - please. Take a similar photo using the app, then save it to your phone. You’ll notice that once saved, the image loses quality.

T

Tung5CAB

Participant

Is focus stacking on your roadmap for project indigo ? I want to do focus stacking right on my phone but there isn't an app that works...

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - focus stacking is something we will work on, definitely. Please stay tuned for more news in the coming months.

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Norman359727959y38

Participating Frequently

Hi

Can I check this request: will you be researching the option for Focus STACKING, or will Pi seek to enable FOCUS BRACKETING?

I have a goto app for FOCUS Bracketing (CameraPixels), but I don't believe there is an app in the store that enables Focus Stacking, apart from the specialist app Star Stacker. Stacking currently has to be done on the desktop with Adobe tools or a TP app like Helicon Focus.