P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 23, 2025
406 replies
243988 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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Brandon Singer

Participant

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

Known Participant

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

Participant

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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?

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Einar-Adobe-Iceland

Participant

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

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.

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ERORR4K25945328g6pj

Participant

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

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.

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arun_6823

Participant

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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Gide�o

Participant

Dear Adobe Project Indigo Team, I'm incredibly impressed with the work you're doing on Project Indigo. The concept is truly exciting, and I'm eager to see its full potential unfold. Congratulations on what appears to be a groundbreaking initiative!

As a Samsung Android user, I'm particularly interested in the development of the Project Indigo app for the Android platform. Could you share some insights into its progress on Android, specifically concerning Samsung devices?

One key area of curiosity for me is how you plan to navigate the limitations often imposed by Samsung regarding direct camera hardware access. This has historically been a challenge for developers. Do you have a strategy in place to circumvent these restrictions to ensure Project Indigo can fully leverage camera capabilities on Samsung phones?

Thank you for your time and for creating such innovative tools. 😉

R

Raincouver

Participant

Hi Indigo Team,

Thanks for your ongoing work on Project Indigo — the app has great potential and I’m excited to see where it goes.

I wanted to report an issue I’ve recently encountered. About half of the photos I take using the Indigo app end up with a black bar at the bottom of the image. It appears post-capture and seems like a rendering or processing glitch.

Details:

Device: iPhone 15 Pro Max
OS: iOS 26 Beta
Indigo App version: Latest version
Frequency: Roughly 50% of shots

Please let me know if this is a known issue or if there’s a workaround. Please find the sample images below. Appreciate your attention to this!

L

lucasw73817227

Participant

I posted about this a few days ago. I notice it only happening for photos taken with the main 1x camera. It seems to be a black bar added to the pictures so I made a shortcut to remove the bars. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/7f557a743f024e679919fc0f6ff848a8

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying Project Indigo. I can see that you are running iOS 26 Beta. This is not a production-ready iOS version and as such may have bugs. We will be working with Apple to iron out such issues prior to the release of iOS 26 in the fall.

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade more testing using 1.0.2 seems better indoor but still has that extra denoising applied. The bigger issue I am concern is that the hdr tonemap is still not showing on third party app like if using photo compare, please make it like google camera and stock apple photos where it will display sdr for non hdr apps! See attached. Using gphotos it shows hdr tonemap fine but hdr gone if using photocompare app!

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Indigo uses the ISO standard (https://www.iso.org/standard/86775.html) for storing gain maps in JPEGs which support SDR and HDR rendering. It is up to other tools in the wider photography ecosystem to implement full support for ISO gain maps.

F

frankherzog

Participating Frequently

Rick,

I'm wondering why I shouldn'tt shoot just JPEG. While RAW certainly gives me more information I rarely shoot images that cross over the exposure lines. I'm wondering what I could be losing with this "old man" approach? I really like the images I'm getting JUST in JPEG. So how to I approach the challenge?

Samples from a rainy day in Carolina.

Regards,

Frank Herzog

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello Frank - thank you for trying Project Indigo and for your stunning captures! These are really wonderful!

The truth is, if JPEG is sufficient for your needs, then keep capturing with JPEG-only. DNG is supposed to offer a few things in editing which JPEG does not, including things like more dynamic range (with less tone mapping, especially local tone mapping, baked in the image itself), ability to modify image temperature and tint better, control the amount of denoising you like, etc. Whether that matters or not is up to you. It may also not impact each image as much, so depending on your typical shooting scenes and conditions, you may benefit from raw DNG captures more or less.

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Blissful_Cadence98BC

Participant

iPhone 13 PM, iOS 18.5Good Camera app , the zoom quality is much better as the original. Urs the right way!

My iPhone Overheating always when i work with the app und the battery discharges quickly.

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