Sticky

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 23, 2025
373 replies
238883 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

Posted by:

Show previous replies

P

Pag0n

Participant

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

@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

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

Thanks. Completed.

wok4_new

Participating Frequently

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

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

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

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

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

G

Generous_problem1425

Participant

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

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

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

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

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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:

1.0.5 on both 16 Pro and 17 Pro
1.0.4 and 1.0.5 on 16 Pro

Thank you for helping us debug this issue!

E

enthusiastic_critic1623

Participating Frequently

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

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hi everyone - thank you for being patient with us. We have finally made a build which is working well enough on iPhone 17-series devices. It is in the App Store now and you should be getting an update in a short time, if not already.

This release brings partial support for iPhone 17. Apart from the already discussed problems with the front camera (which is disabled until a fix in iOS 26.1 is released), we have a few other issues on new devices which are listed in the release notes as in the What's New description in the app. These are:

There are issues with very noisy captures in Photo mode in low light if ISO is high. We suggest using Night mode to capture such scenes, or lowering ISO to 500 or less.
Auto Exposure may flicker in Photo mode in low-light conditions (related to the first bullet point above)
4× telephoto images on 17 Pro and Pro Max devices may exhibit a brighter band toward the bottom of the image.

We are in talks with Apple about the proper solution for these issues. For the first two we think we can have a partial fix from Indigo which we will ship in the next release, but may need some changes from the iOS side for the full fix. For the last one we are investigating further and will let you know if we have a workaround or when a solution may be implemented. Stay tuned.

Hope you like the release and please share your findings, especially on your brand new 17-series devices.

The Indigo Team.

D

default0i09akcya5ak

Participating Frequently

Hi Boris. Just to clarify a little. Would front camera on iPhone 17 work with iOS 26.1 beta 4 ?

thank you

R

Russ Wright

Known Participant

I'm running the beta and it does not. I'm just happy I can use PI with the back cameras. Thanks Adobe! The new version seems to work fine so far but more testing tomorrow.

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded