P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Adobe Employee

Everyone, Indigo 1.0.11 is finally out - apologies for a long delay. Going forward, we will aim to release more frequently (between 2-4 weeks), but targeting smaller improvements instead of making big releases. Exciting times ahead! Thanks to everyone for continuing to support our efforts.

Please find the release notes below.

Indigo team

New features:
- New grid view in the filmstrip. Find your photos more easily. Includes multi-selection for sharing or deletion.
- Use the multi-selection feature in the grid view to import multiple photos into the Lightroom mobile app in one go.
- Filtering of photos in the filmstrip and grid. Select between All Photos, Indigo Album, and Favorites.
- New option to display the 35mm equivalent focal length for rear cameras. Enable in Capture settings.
- Support added for iPhone 17e devices.

Initial iPad support
- Indigo now runs on iPads with at least 6GB of RAM. Note: Project Indigo is not yet tuned for iPad operation. For optimal experience use Project Indigo on an eligible iPhone device.

Bug fixes and improvements:
- Improved overall app stability with a completely reimplemented camera session. You should experience fewer crashes, delays, or hiccups.
- Updated noise and vignetting correction tuning for iPhone 17-series devices.
- Fixed an issue with black Indigo DNG thumbnails when viewed on a Mac.
- Capped exposure time during viewfinding in Night mode for a more responsive viewfinder experience.
- Fixed an issue where overexposed viewfinder was appearing on resuming the app if the app was backgrounded in Night mode with long exposure times.
- Tuned tap-to-focus behavior should help improve focus quality when tapping on small objects when the camera is zoomed in.
- Fixed a bug with vignetting correction for images utilizing the multi-image super-resolution.
- Intra-frame gaps for the Long Exposure feature are now consistent, allowing for better capture of things like light trails.
- Viewfinder video stream is now running at 4K (up from 2K) for a better preview experience when using pinch-to-zoom. It also improves focus loupe sharpness.
- Fixed an occasional bug where capturing photos in rapid succession resulted in two of the photos being identical.
- Fixed a temporary app freeze which may happen occasionally.
- Optimized Auto Exposure computation speed

Known issues:
- In Night mode, when switching quickly from very dark to very bright scenes, the app may get stuck with an overexposed viewfinder for some time. It will converge after a few seconds.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade in this update are there any improvements to the image quality for all devices?

Adobe Employee

Not explicitly. BurstSR is a challenging one to update on a short notice - the team is aware of its shortcomings and will be working on this going forward. As far as tuning other image processing, we may do more tuning depending on what kind of feedback we get from our 17-series users: if most users are happy, then it makes sense for us to tackle more devices.

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Marten5E12

Participant

When I import my images from Indigo to Lightroom I sometimes only get a low res dng-file (aprox 1200x1600px). I have provided a link to an example here. Could be the app is having trouble merging frames because of the moving bus? Thing is that in Indigo I see a full res image. I suppose this is the jpg although the jpg is nowhere to be found in Lightroom. Please help. Do I need to swap some setting or change the workflow or is this a bug?Yellow bus and flowers

Adobe Employee

Hello Marten. Thank you for reaching out. Can you check whether you disabled BurstSR in the settings? It looks like this was a macro capture, so you probably had 1x Macro, which means 0.5x lens was used with 2x digital upscaling. The way Indigo works is that, if digital zoom is used (i.e., the sensor FOV is cropped) the JPEG is always upscaled to 12MP, but the DNG is only upscaled by 2x if BurstSR is enabled. So, if you do 2x digital upscaling, the DNG will be 12MP. If you do 4x digital upscaling, the DNG will be 3MP. However, if BurstSR is disabled then there is no upscaling of the DNG and you get exactly what the crop was: for 2x digital zoom it’s 3MP, and for 4x digital zoom it’s ~1.3MP.

If you do have BurstSR enabled, then either you used Macro but with a 2x-equivalent zoom (i.e., 0.5x lens with 4x digital zoom), or there is a bug somewhere and we’d need to investigate. I’ll see if the metadata in the JPEG you shared is enough for us to figure out what happened.

Known Participant

Hi @Rikk Flohr_Photography and @BorisTheBlade, this question is more for lightroom mobile than it is more for Indigo. I noticed that if using the latest lrm on latest iOS for my 17 pro max on the 48mp pro raw dng, and exporting it as jpeg, the result is much different than if you using nomacs on pc or any adobe app on pc. The adobe pc apps export similar as the lrm app if it helps, but nomacs output differently (more detailed).

Instructions: Take 48mp proraw on main lens on the 17 pro/pro max series (preferrable on foliages like pine trees for high frequencies detailing), import to lightroom mobile, go to profiles, slide apple proraw profiles to 0, turn off all denoising and sharpening as well. Then go to light tab, slide exposure up to like +2 or so (maybe higher) to make picture visible, then slide shadows to +100. Export as jpeg. Now do the same in nomacs pc app, adobe lightroom classic or photoshop. You will see that the nomacs jpeg export has fine details while the other apps will still have the softness and heavy denoising applied. I did this over the weekend, on multiple different scenes and nomacs jpeg output always have more details.

I can attach a raw file for testing as well.

Known Participant

Update: So from further testing, it looks like somehow lightroom mobile is not rejecting the metadata from the embedded portion of the proraw, no matter what you changed it’s pretty much you editing the jpeg of it via the raw container and not the actual dng. There’s an android app called unmcrawsome that is able to remove the metadata it seems and was able to process the dng only!

homerwooper

Participant

why can't use flashlight

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade qdwang, the developer of Camac mentioned that iOS 26.4 supports 12 bit avif. Would this benefit Indigo going forward to support true 12 bit hdr raw? This would be amazing if Indigo can do this!

Adobe Employee

Indigo is already using 16 bits for raw DNG.

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade 16 bit as in hosting 16 bit content not as 12bit or 16 bit via white level and black level? Ie… 10bit is 1023 white level which I am sure Indigo’s same.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade I want to quickly ask if there are improvements coming mainly i care about the 2x super res zoom and a new 48mp dng mode by stacking several shifted 12mp images? Currently the 2x zoom is not reliable,takes a lot of time to process,heats the device, drains battery and the output results look significantly softer than a 2x zoom from say an iPhone 15 stock camera app especially when there is subject motion present in the scene and it seems like the output even in dng is significantly denoised especially in the areas of the moving subject/s. Also on the edges of the image there are areas that look like blur is applied to them and text doesnt look sharp at all so capturing anything moving results in a blurry mess!

Known Participant

Boris said the tuning work has been completed, especially for the 17 series, and they are working to polish up on some things before release. Sadly he didn’t give any details on how they look now vs current version :( @BorisTheBlade maybe you can elaborate a bit more? For example, the issue powerfull_elixir5e29 mentioned with super rez and motion subject are mostly because of spatial denoise improperly tuned? How are they looking now? Has manual exposure been fixed? Before it doesn’t matter what exposure you set, it gets overwritten by the code, to have the set specific look based on tenthousandpigeon said on reddit.

Also the alignment of images that has been brought to attention before that the images tend to shift to the upper left area in night mode on all rear lenses.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@nhan_8084 but i am specifically asking about the super res zoom dng and jpeg results and if they have been improved to match dedicated 2x telephoto lenses even when there are moving subjects in the frame and not really asking about the other algorithm for just denoising and dynamic range but for the super resolution and denoising one, the one when you press the 2x button.

colorzh

Participant

I Use Iphone 17e, But it seem not work, is not support iphone 17e? OS version is ios 26.3.1

ttphoto151000

Participant

Hi, I’m new to the Pi app, as I’ve only just upgraded to an iPhone 17 pro. I have been a photographer for a number of years and I am really enjoying it so far.
I have also just purchased the Telesin Master Grip for my phone and whilst there is some functionality with this grip, I’d really like the dial on the Telesin grip to be able to move between shutter speed and ISO in the Pro controls.

Do you have any plans to offer full support for Telesin grips?

Adobe Employee

Thank you for reaching out, and welcome to the community. Indigo is still in experimental stage, so 3rd party hardware or software support is not on our priority list yet - there is a lot of work to do to add more magical features, improve on the existing ones, and make the app overall faster, more stable, and more delightful for daily use. We will consider support for such grips down the line once we get the base functionality and quality of the app to the level that makes us happy. In the meantime, if there are other aspects of the app which would make your experience better, please let us know.

Blueflame09

Participant

I used the indigo app on my 16 pro. very much impressed. recently changed to android. I’m really waiting for the android release of your app. Is there any tentative release date?

Known Participant

they mentioned it’s their goals to have it but not any time soon as iPhone is priority and there’s still lots of work.

sam_c_om_

Participant

Dear Project Indigo Team,

I’m writing to you as a huge fan of Project Indigo. I’m deeply impressed by the work you’ve done with computational photography; the way the app handles image processing and sensor data is truly top-tier and has become essential for my mobile photography workflow.

I’m reaching out with a specific feature request that would be a significant quality-of-life improvement for users who treat their iPhones as serious imaging tools. I frequently use high-quality external lenses (such as anamorphic or telephoto glass) mounted on my phone to expand its technical capabilities.

Because of the optical design of these external lenses, the image projected onto the sensor is often inverted. Currently, this makes it very difficult to utilize Project Indigo’s computational features in real-time, as both the preview and the final processed output are flipped.

The Request: Could you add a toggle to flip or invert the image (Horizontal/Vertical) within the app?

As an app dedicated to the technical excellence of computational photography, providing a way to correct for external optics would be a massive asset for the enthusiast community. It would allow us to compose and leverage your processing power natively without the need for destructive transformations in post-production.

Thank you for your dedication to pushing the boundaries of what mobile sensors can do. I look forward to the future of the app!