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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
Community Manager
May 23, 2025
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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

  • May 23, 2025
  • 361 replies
  • 232569 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. 

 

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 
 
Posted by: 

 

      361 replies

      Show previous replies
      gordonw60541095
      gordonw60541095
      Participating Frequently
      July 6, 2025

      Recently downloaded PI to my iPhone 16 Pro. The attached jpegs (hope they come through) show that in Photo mode, when compared to the iPhone camera app in Photo mode ('Most Compatible' to generate a simple jpeg rather than HEIF), the PI image is noticeably softer and has color fringing. Both were shot at 5x. These were straight out of camera. 

       

      Has anyone else seen this?

      B
      Adobe Employee
      BorisTheBlade
      Adobe Employee
      July 8, 2025

      Hi Gordon - thank you very much for trying Indigo and for sharing your findings with us. I have a few questions for you:

      • Were these captures handheld or did you use a tripod?
      • How was focusing performed? Did you tap to focus on both, or just on one, or did you rely on the camera purely auto-focusing itself?
      • Do you know what were the lighting conditions for this scene? Would you say that the illumination was of the order of 1lux, 10lux, 100lux, etc.?
      • Do you by any chance have a DNG for the Indigo capture you can share?

       

      Appreciate the help!

      E
      Ed5E57
      Participating Frequently
      July 8, 2025
      Boris it would be useful if your replies show the original post. With the volume people posting about their experiences with indigo it is very hard to connect your responses to a specific question or comment

      Thanks in advance, Ed

      Get Outlook for iOS<>
      N
      nhan_8084
      Participating Frequently
      July 6, 2025

      Was testing 5x indoors and noticed something strange, all shots shown below are taken with normal mode and not night modes.  One shot of the same scene, as you see from a crop of it(8989) to show that processing did not apply at all, very grainy and noisy, sorta like luma denoising is completely turn off (which is a good thing to have control of like this shot at times), then the same scene shot has almost perfect granular tuning.  This tuning is the type of tuning that I want the team at Project Indigo to do for all lenses at all conditions to be honest(670).  Then there's the shot with processing applied too much(357).  I understand that image (357) has a much lesser iso while the others iso at 1000, but tuning can be adjust static and not iso triggered because it might apply overdenoising as seen, turning it into oil painting!  @BorisTheBlade 

      H
      Hans N 25
      Participant
      July 6, 2025

      I am using a 14 pro and can't get to settings, I can see it but it moves back before i can tap it.  Also yesterday my phone overheated to a poing that the screen darkened so much it was unuseable.  I had to ge back into indoors to AC and let the phone cool down

      B
      Adobe Employee
      BorisTheBlade
      Adobe Employee
      July 8, 2025

      Hello Hans. Thank you for trying Indigo, and sorry to hear about your troubles.

      On the Settings icon, do you by any chance have 'Button Shapes' toggle enabled in the device settings under Accessibility -> Display & Text Size? Alternatively, do you have Display Zoom set to 'Large' in device settings under Display & Brightness?

      X
      xavier_4156
      Participant
      July 5, 2025

      I have some questions and suggestions for this amazing app which seems to have unlimited potential.

       

      FIRST, I will start with the things you guys are doing perfectly, the SUPERRESOLUTION zoom is absolutely incredible and works amazingly. I love the MUCH better processing you do on the 5xens on my 15 pro max. It is just miles above the normal camera app processing for that camera. That said I do have complaints.

       

      Firstly the processing for the main lens seems worse then the processing for the 5x lens, it is less saturated and less pleasing in general and overexposes or under exposes way to often. I would honestly just copy and paste the processing for the other lens into the main one. Second complaint, this app DOES NOT use 24mp as the default even though with my device (15pm) it is the default, is this on the roadmap to add 24mp / 48mp support? Last complaint is that night mode seems to be broken as images come out either completely black or with one red highlight in the middle. Very odd but I'm sure it will be fixed in time.

       

      In total, THANK YOU SO MUCH for creating the best iPhone camera app and letting us actually use the full potential of the amazing cameras in our pockets. Final question, will this stay free? What is the plan for updates to this app and will this functionality always stay free or will it go behind a subscription (please don't ☹).

       

      Also I have attached a photo of my father right out of the camera app, this has no external editing, it's amazing what the processing on the 5x lens looks like just straight out of the app. Unfortunately as mentioned above, the photo processing on the other lens's are not up to the same standard, I hope this is improved!

       

      Final thank you 🙂

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        July 8, 2025

        Hello Xavier - thank you for trying Indigo and for providing your detailed thoughts and critique. To address some of your complaints:

        • On comparing processing between 1x lens and 5x lens, are you able to share some examples where 5x is clearly better than the 1x in the same environment? 
        • On image resolution, Indigo unfortunately only gets access to 12MP raw images. We can get 48MP images with Apple's ProRaw, but that would prevent us from doing our computational photography, or by applying our super-resolution to increase the output resolution, but for that we need to optimize the code more to prevent any additional overheating.
        • For the Night mode captures which look black, can you share what kind of settings are you using? Is this point-and-shoot Night mode capture, or do you have Pro controls enabled? If so, which Pro controls are on/off? Do you have an example DNG you can share with us so we can inspect?

         

        Thank you for the help!

        J
        João23738580ajt9
        Participating Frequently
        July 5, 2025

        Good morning,

         

        I'm using Indigo with an iPhone 14 pro, and the latest update disabled Super Resolution. I want to activate it again, but I can't find the settings section. Can someone help me?

        E
        Ed5E57
        Participating Frequently
        July 6, 2025
        They disabled another of the features due to overheating including SR.

        Get Outlook for iOS<>
        J
        João23738580ajt9
        Participating Frequently
        July 6, 2025

        In the Indigo app page, they sy it's possible to activate SR again in these older models: - Disabled super-resolution by default on iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max, and iPhone 15/15+ devices. It can be re-enabled in the Settings menu, but may warm up your phone

         

        https://apps.apple.com/us/app/project-indigo/id6742591546

        A
        andrea-hongkong
        Participant
        July 5, 2025

        When will it be available at the App Store in Hong Kong?

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        July 9, 2025
        quote

        When will it be available at the App Store in Hong Kong?


        By @andrea-hongkong

        Hi Andrea - Indigo is available in the Hong Kong App Store as of yesterday. Try it out and let us know what you think.

        B
        Brandon Singer
        Participant
        July 4, 2025

        Great app! A cool feature would be the abilty to take a series of photos to make a 360 HDRI to be used with other Adobe apps.

        rus5
        rus5
        Known Participant
        July 4, 2025

        Just downloaded and trying to understand PI.  The FAQ Adobe provides is extremely sparce and there's little info on-line that I can find (a couple of not-too-great videos is all so far).  So two really basic questions in case anyone knows the answers (using iPhone 16 Pro Max):

        1) why do all my photos no matter what and I how I shoot them always show a red "HDR" with a white bar though it at the top ?  This shows no matter how I have my display brightness or anything else set.

        2) the round circle at the bottom left is supposed to show the numbe of photos being processed according to the live "tip" but it's never anything but "1".  Why is it always only "1".

        3) sometimes there is a round icon at the top left with a camrea in it and a partial white or red circle around it.  Does anyone know what that means ?

        Thanks !  Russ

         

        Silver_Shadow4
        Silver_Shadow4
        Participant
        July 6, 2025

        I downloaded Project Indigo camera app to my iPhone 14 Pro knowing it was recommended for 15 and 16 models.  I liked the images and how Indigo was processing them but noticed that my phone performance was significantly degraded so I deleted the PI app, however, my phone performance is still degraded...slow responses in Safari, videos freeze, etc.  How do I get my phone back to pre-Indigo condition?  Thank you.

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        July 8, 2025

        Hello - thank you for trying Indigo. Sorry to hear about the troubles with the device performance. We are working hard on adding more optimizations to the app to make it run better on all supported iPhones. In the meantime, have you tried restarting your phone to see if that helps with the performance in other apps?

        E
        Einar-Adobe-Iceland
        Participant
        July 4, 2025

        I have the Indigo app on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. When when trying to slide to the left, I can't reach the wheel button dor further pref settings. I can see it, bud the bar slides a little back making it impossible for me to click the settings wheel.

        M
        michaela38849736
        Known Participant
        July 5, 2025

        Go to iPhone settings/display and brightness/display zoom and make sure it's set to "default". 
        thr "larger text" settings causes this problem on my 15 pro max. 

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        July 8, 2025

        Hello Einar and Michaela - thank you for this discussion. Another possible reason may be if you have the 'Button Shapes' toggle enabled in the device settings under Accessibility -> Display & Text Size.

        E
        ERORR4K25945328g6pj
        Participant
        July 4, 2025

        Hello Adobe team, could you let us know if there are any intentions to open-source?

         

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        July 8, 2025

        Hello - thank you for your interest in Project Indigo. We do not have intentions to open-source Indigo code at this time. It is an experimental app for our team to evaluate camera-related technologies and collect feedback from the wider community of photographers and photography enthusiasts. 

        A
        arun_6823
        Participant
        July 3, 2025

        Hi Team, this is remarkable and I can already see a lot of difference- when is this coming to android with the likes of Galaxy S25 Ultra, Pixel Series, Vivo X200U any thoughts?

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