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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
  • 354 replies
  • 225567 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: 

 

      354 replies

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      J
      johndoc1
      Participating Frequently
      October 30, 2025

      I post here because I didn't see an Indigo community.  If there is a better community, please transfer this post.

       

      I have an iOS 17pro phone and just had Project Indigo (Version 10.5) appear after not being available initially.  I set the photo format to DNG. I immediately tried a set of photos (0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x) of the same scene to check operation.  None of the photos were 48mp!  Some were as low as 3mp.  Also, the images were gray-like.  I immediately switched back to the Apple camera, shot the same scene and got 48mp for 0.5, 1.0, 4.0 and 12mp for 2 and 8x.  I then tried DNG+JPG.  Still no 48mp (1x photo).  Inside Project Indigo, I had two versions of the photo, one labeled JPG and one labeled DNG+JPG.  In my camera roll (iPhone Photos), only the JPG appeared.

      A few questions:

      1. How do I set Project Indigo to use the 48mp cameras
      2. Why do the DNGs look gray (unprocessed?)?
      3.  Why don't I see a DNG file in my camera roll?

       

      Appreciate any help on the 17Pro.

      John D

      T
      toni_0822
      Participant
      October 31, 2025

      Hey, one Page before the 48mp topic was already mentioned. Just gonna repost what the dev told the other user:

      "Indigo does not support more than 12MP capture. ... We are looking into adding some form of 48MP support for Indigo, but that is not available yet."

      About the rest I have no idea, sorry😅

      But maybe you will figure out more if you red a few of the past pages, definitely helpful information there of some kind.

       

      Have a great day🙂👋

      J
      johndoc1
      Participating Frequently
      November 2, 2025

      Thanks for the reply.  Bummer.  

      P
      Pag0n
      Participant
      October 28, 2025

      Hey! It's my first time trying out Indigo, running the latest version on my iPhone 17. It seems that sometimes the photos are way overexposed and sometimes way underexposed, like in the example below. The first image is from Indigo and the bottom one is from the stock camera. Neither is perfect but the stock photo is much closer to reality. Indigo seems to struggle the most when aimed to a bright light source. Is this normal? Do I need to manually adjust the exposure when taking photos?

      B
      Adobe Employee
      BorisTheBlade
      Adobe Employee
      October 28, 2025
      quote

      Hey! It's my first time trying out Indigo, running the latest version on my iPhone 17. It seems that sometimes the photos are way overexposed and sometimes way underexposed, like in the example below. The first image is from Indigo and the bottom one is from the stock camera. Neither is perfect but the stock photo is much closer to reality. Indigo seems to struggle the most when aimed to a bright light source. Is this normal? Do I need to manually adjust the exposure when taking photos?

      By @Pag0n

      Thank you for sharing these examples. A photo like this is very difficult to capture faithfully, because the dynamic range in the scene is quite large: between the very bright lamp and the dark books below the small table, the camera needs to decide what to prioritize during capture, and then the AI look has to decide how to render the image for viewing on the display. Generally speaking, Indigo tries to not blow out the highlights while the native camera app usually doesn't care about preserving the highlights as much and instead pushes the shadows up. With highlights preserved one usually has an opportunity to brighten the image in editing, while if the highlights are destroyed there is no way to recover them without some for of hallucinated generative AI. Our goal is to reproduce what a human eyes would have seen as faithfully as we can, but of course we may not always hit the mark. We will keep tuning our look over time with more and more examples added to our training and evaluation datasets.

        N
        nhan_8084
        Participating Frequently
        October 28, 2025

        @BorisTheBlade I can confirm that Indigo does always under expose vs stock camera, however that isn't always good for jpeg since it isn't true to scene.  For iPhone 17 series, the exposure and hdr apple has now is almost perfect to the human eyes(aside from led neon signs, and lightbulbs) in pretty much all scenes tested.  Can Indigo do ETTR?  Raw is fine as is but I noticed that unless you hit reset to all in lightroom mobile, the saturation/vibrance levels are quite high.  The Indigo jpeg also have the same high levels of saturation vs stock which is very accurate in terms of saturation/vibrance as well.

        T
        t.linn
        Known Participant
        October 28, 2025

        I'm seeing a notice that a survey should be available in the Settings area. Having just downloaded and opened v1.0.5 of the app, I am eager to participate. However, I can't find it. Where is it? I've looked in both the Settings section of the app, and the app settings in the Settings app. I don't see it anywhere.

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        October 28, 2025
        quote

        I'm seeing a notice that a survey should be available in the Settings area. Having just downloaded and opened v1.0.5 of the app, I am eager to participate. However, I can't find it. Where is it? I've looked in both the Settings section of the app, and the app settings in the Settings app. I don't see it anywhere.


        By @t.linn

        Thank you for asking this question - if you go to the app settings, then scroll down to the Feedback section, you will see a "Have feedback?" row - click on the chat icon and a survey will open.

          T
          t.linn
          Known Participant
          October 28, 2025

          Thanks. Completed.

          wok4_new
          wok4_new
          Participating Frequently
          October 27, 2025

          Good morning!

          I just downloaded PI to may new iPhone 17Pro, and I am not able to figure out how to set the camera resolution to 48MPix - which,  strongly believe, was working on my iPhne 15 Pro.

           

          Thanke for help!

          Wolfgang

          B
          Adobe Employee
          BorisTheBlade
          Adobe Employee
          October 27, 2025
          quote

          Good morning!

          I just downloaded PI to may new iPhone 17Pro, and I am not able to figure out how to set the camera resolution to 48MPix - which,  strongly believe, was working on my iPhne 15 Pro.

           

          Thanke for help!

          Wolfgang


          By @wok4_new

          Hi Wolfgang - Indigo does not support more than 12MP capture. I believe you were either using the native camera app or another 3rd party camera app to capture Apple's ProRaw. We are looking into adding some form of 48MP support for Indigo, but that is not available yet.

            T
            t.linn
            Known Participant
            October 28, 2025

            I really do hope you figure out how to achieve 48MP captures on the iPhone Pros which are capable of that resolution. PI transformed my attitude about smartphone photography, but it hurts to sacrifice resolution to use it. (iPhone 17 Pro here.)

            C
            c-oliff
            Participant
            October 27, 2025

            I have a Japan iPhone 17 and opening the app just continually emits the shutter click sound... it can't be muted or turned off so the app is currently unusable 😞 This issue was present in the previous version when I had an iPhone 14 too. Hope Adobe engineers can fix this!

            B
            Adobe Employee
            BorisTheBlade
            Adobe Employee
            October 28, 2025
            quote

            I have a Japan iPhone 17 and opening the app just continually emits the shutter click sound... it can't be muted or turned off so the app is currently unusable 😞 This issue was present in the previous version when I had an iPhone 14 too. Hope Adobe engineers can fix this!


            By @c-oliff

            This has been covered quite a bit in the past, but to reiterate, the issue here is more of a legal nature than an engineering one: some countries either outright regulate, or "strongly recommend" (and OEMs follow the recommendation) to issue a non-preventable shutter sound every time a photo capture is requested from the OS. Indigo imploys a Zero Shutter Lag system in the viewfinder to do auto exposure and to find the exact frame that matches the time you pressed the shutter button. But to do that, we continuously request raw frames from the OS, and for every request, as required, a shutter sound is issued. We are in talks with Apple to find a solution to this issue, but as you can imagine, it is not trivial.

            D
            demo_5934
            Participating Frequently
            October 27, 2025

            Hi developers, thanks for making such a powerful app! Not sure if it's an Indigo or iOS Lightroom bug, I noticed inconsistant lens distortion corrections behaviour. After exporting Indigo RAW to iOS Lightroom,

             

            1. Main camera, toggling "Enable lens corrections" only affects vignettee/tone. There is no lens distortion corrections. By comparasion, toggling "Enable lens corrections" on Lightroom RAW will apply distortion correction and one can easily see the differneces in the ceter area.

             

            2. Ultra wide camera, toggling "Enable lens corrections" does apply vignettee/tone+distortion corrections, however, the distortion correction is different from that on Lightroom RAW. Indigo applies more corrections at the corners.

             

            D
            demo_5934
            Participating Frequently
            October 27, 2025

            Forgot to mention, device: iPhone 17 Pro Max, iOS Lightroom version: 11.0.0

            G
            Generous_problem1425
            Participant
            October 26, 2025

            Hi - enjoying PI a lot, but (just out of interest) took a macro shot of the top of my kitchen table. Reporting, with attached .dng file, because if you look at the bottom left of the image there's some weird purple noise. iPhone 15 pro max.

            B
            Adobe Employee
            BorisTheBlade
            Adobe Employee
            October 27, 2025
            quote

            Hi - enjoying PI a lot, but (just out of interest) took a macro shot of the top of my kitchen table. Reporting, with attached .dng file, because if you look at the bottom left of the image there's some weird purple noise. iPhone 15 pro max.


            By @Generous_problem1425

            Thank you for helping us test the app. Unfortunately, the DNG file did not get attached... I have been bugging the forum plaform provider to enable DNG upload but it still does not seem to be working. *sigh* If you don't mind, can you try to attach it to your message again, and if that doesn't work, add it to a file sharing service (e.g., Google Drive)? Thank you very much!

            C
            cutch2222
            Known Participant
            October 26, 2025

            I would like to see the camera settings on each of the example photos. (In particular the dynamic range example of the couple sitting in front of a window)  I am unable to match results even when setting lowest ISO, longest shutter and/or 32 image stack. 

            C
            chrisd40442477
            Participating Frequently
            October 25, 2025

            This is my favorite update for the new Indigo app especially running the 17ProMax.

             

            I do not use Lightroom for anything but only used it in the prior version as a conduit to get my raw Indigo files into my editor of choice, capture one.  Image transfers on this new version of the app are seamless and much less clunky. I shoot only raw when using Indigo. If I want to edit the raw file I simply export to the Files app where I have an Indigo folder ready to go.

             

            I go to my Mac open the Indigo folder in the Files app and drag the raw images into my capture one session on the Mac, or on C1 for iPad. When I launch that session I have a recipe saved whereby my Indigo raw files are altered for a great beginning to final edits. 

            A stunning beginning to an updated Indigo app for iPhone 17 Pro Max!

              E
              enthusiastic_critic1623
              Participating Frequently
              October 25, 2025

              The new version feedback:
              In the new version of the imaging the white balance tint is shifting towards green.(
              I confirmed this by simultaneously capturing photos with the 16 Pro (version 1.0.4) and the 17 Pro Max (version 1.0.5), whether I use color temperature/tint (at 6600K) or auto.))

              B
              Adobe Employee
              BorisTheBlade
              Adobe Employee
              October 27, 2025
              quote

              The new version feedback:
              In the new version of the imaging the white balance tint is shifting towards green.(
              I confirmed this by simultaneously capturing photos with the 16 Pro (version 1.0.4) and the 17 Pro Max (version 1.0.5), whether I use color temperature/tint (at 6600K) or auto.))


              By @enthusiastic_critic1623

              Thank you for sharing your findings. However, to rule out possible causes for the shift, it would be helpful to either use the same version of the app on 2 different devices, or different versions of the app on the same device. If you don't mind repeating the testing like:

              1. 1.0.5 on both 16 Pro and 17 Pro
              2. 1.0.4 and 1.0.5 on 16 Pro

              Thank you for helping us debug this issue!

              E
              enthusiastic_critic1623
              Participating Frequently
              October 28, 2025

              Sorry, after your reminder, there is indeed a difference in the display of my two devices. Please ignore my feedback.

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