P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 23, 2025
406 replies
243952 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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conrad2k

Participant

This is an amazing start. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us. I am particularly pleased with the macro capabilities, though it seems that the macro function is only able to be turned on when the camera detects the lens is too close for a traditional photo. If I miss that prompt, it seems that I have to restart the app before the macro prompt is offered again. A dedicated macro button under the 'pro' tools would be a nice touch. Am I missing something? Thanks for sharing this app, and hopefully you will add M series iPad Pro capabilities soon!

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conrad2k

Participant

When I shared a photo from the indigo app to my iPad via AirDrop, it would only share the jpg file. To see the DNG on the iPad, I had to open it in LR and export it as a DNG file to the iCloud. Is there no way to directly share the DNG?

Is the 12MP images limit (regardless of which of the iPhone 16 Pro cameras was used to shoot the image), simply because higher MP images are more computationally intensive? It would be worth the wait for computation would be worth it on some shots, like landscapes.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for your messages and for trying out Indigo. I'll respond to both messages here:

There is no way currently to manually start the Macro mode. We will explore ways to expose it explicitly in the future.
To share DNGs from Indigo, I'd recommend checking the great writeup from Greg Benz here: https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-reviews/project-indigo-the-best-camera-app-for-smart-phones/
On 48MP images, the main limitation is that iOS does not provide 3rd party apps acces to 48MP raw data: only 12MP is raw, and 48MP is Apple's ProRaw, will their computational photography and image processing style. We will explore ways for us to offer larger resolution images in the future.

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karen_5438

Participant

I've been waiting for this app for quite a time mainly because i was tired of waiting for Apple to add proper astrophotography mode!

Please add proper Astrophotography mode (same or better than on Pixel)

D

derosa42

Participant

I am using an I phone 16 Pro Max. I have done about 4 shooting session. Flowers, some macro. I did just 4-5 shots and got a message the the phone was overheating. Any thoughts.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Thank you for your message and for trying Indigo camera. Overheating is a known issue on some devices and the team is hard at work to minimize the impact of that. Once we have a version of the app which helps mitigate the issues, we will release it to the public and would like to hear back from you to know whether the problems were minimized or resolved.

MJDwnc

Participant

Thanks for developing this exciting camera app. We all certainly appreciate the opportunity to use it at this early stage of development!

Feature request: I would like to have the ability to activate the shutter remotely, such as with my Apple Watch.

Looking forward to seeing how the feature set of this new pro-level app develops!

leed24280355

Participating Frequently

I am also getting heating issue on iPhone 14 Pro.

Once a DNG has been imported into Lightroom (Cloud) on my Macbook, if I change the profile, I can no longer go back to the Indigo profile - there isn't an option to reselect it. I

If I use the option to reset all edits on a DNG in my Macbook version of Lightroom (Cloud), I also lose the Indigo profile - it gets changes to 'Adobe Color'. Adaptive Color is available as an option but not Indigo.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for your comments. To go back to the Indigo profile in Lightroom, you can click on the 'Browse' button and then go to 'User Profiles'. This is a bit buried and we will work together with the Camera Raw Lightroom teams to expose it better in an update.

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francois_2687

Participant

I'm very happy to discover this new camera app on ios. But despite the really good job, an easy to use user interface and the good quality of the pictures, I was disappointed to discover that the geolocation data is not filled in and that the file names are random.
I'm sorry, but for me it's crippling (rédhibitoire in french).

I would still like to commend the excellent work done 👍

Regards

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for your feedback.

For the geolocation, can you confirm that you have granted the app permission to access the location data of the device? You can go to the camera settings and tap on any of the permissions, which will take you straight to the system settings. There you can check if Location access is granted.
For the filename, are you referring to the long file name starting with IDG? If so, that file name is not random, but is based on date and timestamp so it is easy to sort and find by capture time. If it is something else, do let me know what to look for.

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francois_2687

Participant

How yes my bad, access to the phone location was off... Wonderfull I will use P.Indigo to replace Apple Camera.
FOr the name, I don't understand because into photo name are like IDG+Date+Timestamp+number but when I open picture repertory in windows names are completely random like RQEY5741.JPG or PXXQ2286.jpg or again OBZL9606.jpg. I don't know why...

Thanks for your help

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade Also please make it a way so raw is viewable in the default photos app or the google photos viewer for easy sharing as I do not use my laptop much, and want everything to strictly focus on mobile. Most app allows sharing dng via gphotos or accessible via clients like telegram, so PI should do this as well.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - would you mind explaining your request a bit more so that I don't wrongly understand what you are asking. Is it for Indigo to allow DNG-only capture, or for the Indigo sharing option in the filmstrip to allow to share DNGs, or both of those, or something else? Thank you.

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade So the dng captures fine, however upon viewing the photo in gphotos or apple photos app, sharing it to telegram or anywhere will only share the embedded jpeg and not the actual .dng raw file. Raw dng is only viewable if using lightroom mobile or lightroom app it seems. My request is to have separate .jpeg and .dng so that way the .dng is able to be shared by gphotos and apple photos gallery app to third party clients like Telegram vs having to use pc to drag the .dng from phone to desktop then share. I want to make sharing convenient via mobile, and to android devices!

whispy snippet

Participating Frequently

I've been reading all about this new Indigo camera app this evening and can't wait to see it come to the Pixel series. I've been desperate to see the indisputable benefits of computational photography without the added baggage of the "HDR-y", over saturated and over sharpened look. Everything you're working on is exactly what I've been looking for - smart phone imagery that is cleaner and more detailed but natural and true to life. Super excited!

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hobena40394194

Participant

Hi, I'm reporting a bug I’ve encountered with the Project Indigo camera app.

Because I’m in South Korea, my phone automatically plays a shutter sound every time the camera is triggered.

I believe this might be related to the issue I’m experiencing.

As soon as I launch the app, the camera shutter sound starts playing repeatedly at 0.1-second intervals, non-stop.

It happens immediately upon opening the app and continues indefinitely.

I’ve recorded a video to demonstrate the issue and have attached it here. Is anyone else experiencing the same problem?

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hobena40394194

Participant

This post was accidentally uploaded twice, and this is the duplicate.

Could a moderator please delete this post? Thank you!

H

hobena40394194

Participant

Hi, I'm reporting a bug I’ve encountered with the Project Indigo camera app.

Because I’m in South Korea, my phone automatically plays a shutter sound every time the camera is triggered. I believe this might be related to the issue I’m experiencing.

As soon as I launch the app, the camera shutter sound starts playing repeatedly at 0.1-second intervals, non-stop. It happens immediately upon opening the app and continues indefinitely.

I’ve recorded a video to demonstrate the issue and have attached it here.

Is anyone else experiencing the same problem?

Thanks in advance for your help.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello - thank you for your message and for reporting the issue. This was reported earlier on the thread, and unfortunately there is not much we can do for now: Indigo camera runs a constant stream of raw frames during viewfinding and stores them temporarily in a buffer. When a shutter button is pressed, we combine several of those frames into one photo and we issue a shutter sound. However, in Japan and South Korea there is a requirement that every raw photo request to iOS must issue a shutter sound, even if that raw frame is not used for the capture. That is why our viewfinder sounds like it is constantly "capturing" photos.

Before iOS 18, we had this problem in other regions as well, but Apple introduced an API that allows us to block the shutter sound and issue it only once the user actually captures a photo. However, that API does not work in SK or Japan. We worked with Apple on that API, and will continue to investigate options on solving this in SK and Japan, but given that the control is not in our hands, we cannot give any clear guidelines for when, or even if, this can be fixed without sacrificing the resulting image quality and/or the app functionality.

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