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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
May 23, 2025
401 replies
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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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Peter A Blacksberg

Participating Frequently

1) Spatial differences noted between DNG and JPG output iPhone 17 Pro .5x setting:
Files loaded in layers in PS to show delta: screen grabs (from MAC)
2) UX - will benefit from a GEAR settings where resides 'all available settings' - rather than / or in addition to context setting approach,

KUDOS FOR THIS WORK. @11491779.a.blacksberg (Dig imaging user since 1981)

F

frankherzog

Participating Frequently

LOVE Indigo! It has become my camera. Question: iPhone 17pro max with Indigo 8x (85mm) lens. IF I attach the Reeflex 240mm lens how many mm's do I wind up with? Sorry, my math skills deteriorated a long long time ago.

Frank

P

Pag0n

Participant

Hey! A quick question, is it normal that when using the 17 Pro's 4x lens you have to scoot back about 20 cm (8 inches) for the subject to be in focus? Adjusting focus with the pro mode doesn't change this.

Below are three photos. The one with the Indigo viewfinder show the same amount of blur that taking the image would yield after processing. The second one is from the native camera showing that it is in focus from the same distance. The third one is an Indigo shot where I moved as far back as needed to get the subject in focus, which was the previously mentioned 20 cm.

P

Pag0n

Participant

Edit: looks like the photos uploaded out of order, but I hope you catch my drift.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Edit: looks like the photos uploaded out of order, but I hope you catch my drift.

By @Pag0n

Native camera uses a nice "trick" to make you forget about the focus distance: they run what marketing calls a "fusion camera", where all 3 camera modules (ultrawide, wide, and telephoto) are active at the same time. This allows them to, amongst other things, detect when your subject is too close for the current camera and autimatically switch to a wider one. For example, if you are on a telephoto lens, they may under the hood switch you to the wide lens without informing you about it. If you are too close even for the wide camera, they will switch to the ultra-wide lens, and then you will see the small yellow Macro indicator in the bottom left. In any case, what you end up with, if you capture with the 4x zoom but the camera used to capture is wide, is that the wide camera is cropped to match the 4x FOV, and then it is upscaled back up to your taget image resolution - this will be a serviceable photo, but the effective detail in the image will be lower than the megapixels indicate. Indigo cannot run more than 1 camera in raw capture mode (iOS limitation), so we cannot seamlessly switch you back and forth. We offer a Macro suggestion once we detect that you are too close with your currently used lens, though that suggestion cannot be perfect for certain technical reasons related to how focus works and how cameras behave optically. To test what the true near focus distance is for each lens, open Indigo, switch to Pro mode, open focus control, and move closer to a subject until focus indicator shows 0. You will notice that for telephoto that distance is pretty far.

One additional interesting tidbit - iPhone not only changes the lens to help with the minimum focus distance: it may also change the lens to help with Night shots! Before iPhone 17-series, telephoto cameras were performing much worse in low light compared to wide cameras. Therefore it was beneficial for them to use the wide camera and digitally crop the FOV, as the image quality would be better than dealing with a super-noisy full 12MP telephoto image. I haven't experimented much with night shots on 17 telephoto camera, but it is much improved so the instances where the native camera would switch the lens may be reduced, or even completely removed.

E

Exuberant_genius1513

Participant

Can't select lens when Pro control is enabled. I have to disable Pro control to switch lens

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Can't select lens when Pro control is enabled. I have to disable Pro control to switch lens

By @Exuberant_genius1513

That is by (current) design. We have to trade-off occupying a lot of viewfinder real estate, making it harder to frame, with less flexibility. Furthermore, when zooming you are not just changing the field of view: you may change which camera is being used (ultrawide, wide, or telephoto), with all 3 of them having different sensor and lens characteristics. Some of those characteristics may impact the Pro controls, so it becomes tricky to present all that to the user nicely. Having said that, just like the whole app itself, the UI is also experimental. We will be tweaking and tuning all aspects of the experience, including this, and if there is a good way to enable zoom changes while adjusting Pro controls, we will consider adding it.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Today is official full moon so saw this incredible position and took using Night Mode, Pro Mode manual shutter, iso, 6 frames. Nothing else touched. The zoom is max obviously at 20x. The SOOC jpeg is pretty bad but the raw once heavily edited is usable. Lots of issues in the jpeg including color bleeding, shadow artifacts. Please fix the SR in the future. I will attach both.

R

romantic_ninja5FEF

Participant

well this excess of digital zoom in night mode on a mini sensor is never going to produce a brilliant picture without hallucinating in a situation which is even for a full frame camera with decent lenses a difficult situation!

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

I am well aware of that, but as you can see the dif between raw post and sooc jpeg is massive. Its the jpeg thats needed to be retuned.

G

Gareth Renowden

Participant

Just a quick question (that I haven't found an answer for in reading your docs): what's your preferred social media hashtag for PI pix? I post to BlueSky and Instagram... (@grenow)

Cheers

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Just a quick question (that I haven't found an answer for in reading your docs): what's your preferred social media hashtag for PI pix? I post to BlueSky and Instagram... (@grenow)

Cheers

By @Gareth Renowden

Hi Gareth - thank you for reaching out. Most commonly used one we see is #capturedwithIndigo.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

I did another experiment by adjust iso and ss in night mode and pro mode, 6 frames and ETTR so viewfinder clips but final jpeg and raw still properly exposed. I want to ETTR so that way when I edit the raw in HDR, the SDR base isn't as dark in LRM. I have attached the sooc jpg and the raw post processed, 20x zoom again.

K

Kukulcan67

Participating Frequently

With images still being 12MP I wonder if an upgrade from 15 Pro to 17 Pro would make much of a difference when it comes to Indigo alone regardless of the improvements to iPhone camera.

C

chrisd40442477

Participating Frequently

I took the exact path last month upgrading from a 15 Pro Max to a 17 Pro Max

I am heavy into Indigo usage (only shooting raw) and I will say my opinion is that yes the 17 Pro upgrade is a huge benefit over the 15.

Have been shooting professionally for 40 years, but still feel that 12 megapixels for the majority of usage is more than adequate for many image applications.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Took some shot of the moon today and I got very strange results. First two has artifacts, and I noticed if you align center, the final image shifts left, so I have to align to the right to shift left to center. This is annoying really, and I know probably it has to do with EIS and OIS. Also the white balance can be seen in viewfinder shifting between grey and proper moon thats a tad yellowish white. The blue Indigo image came out even when viewfinder is yellow moon. First two Indigo shots using Night Mode, Pro mode 1 frame. Blue shot Indigo is 20 frames same modes. Stock 20x included for reference.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade Apple just released iOS 26.1, will we see Indigo update with working selfie soon? Also can you please provide to us what is the next update focus for Indigo?

S

Sweet Light

Participating Frequently

It is frustrating trying to do a systematic evaluation of Indigo because it does not record proper metadata for the Focal Length 35mm. I try to be systematic in evaluation photographic equipment. In the case of Indigo, this means organizing files by the Focal Length 35mm equivalent. For some reason Indigo incorrectly records this import metadata. The result is a frustrating amount of time required to cross reference files imported to a desktop computer, viewed in Lighroom, against the Indigo app's information for each file indicating what the digital zoom was. For example, I want to organize all of the images shot at 48 mm SR into a single folder. This way I can compare them to 48 mm images taken with the Apple camera app or a different camera app. Indigo incorrectly shows 24mm as the 35mm equivalent focal length for both 24 mm and 48 mm shots. This is true of 100 mm and 200 mm shots If you want a systematic and proper evaluation done of the Indigo app it would be very helpful that the metadata is recorded accurately. In analysing the iPhone 17 pro camera apps, I treat the iPhone as three different cameras. In addition I want to further differentiate between 24 mm vs 48 mm and 100 mm vs 200 mm photos. This is the basis for evaluating a camera app ability to record images using 14 mm, 24 mm, 48 mm, 100 mm and 200 mm settings.

- 60 Years Photo Experience 4th Generation Photographer - Digital: various ILC starting 2003, Lighroom 1.0 & PS 6.0 up to current versions, plus InDesign & Illustrator , Analog: 35mm, 120, 4X5, 8X10 size Cameras, 24 inch process camera, Darkroom B&W, E-6 Ektachrome + Type C Prints

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

It is frustrating trying to do a systematic evaluation of Indigo because it does not record proper metadata for the Focal Length 35mm. I try to be systematic in evaluation photographic equipment. In the case of Indigo, this means organizing files by the Focal Length 35mm equivalent. For some reason Indigo incorrectly records this import metadata. The result is a frustrating amount of time required to cross reference files imported to a desktop computer, viewed in Lighroom, against the Indigo app's information for each file indicating what the digital zoom was. For example, I want to organize all of the images shot at 48 mm SR into a single folder. This way I can compare them to 48 mm images taken with the Apple camera app or a different camera app. Indigo incorrectly shows 24mm as the 35mm equivalent focal length for both 24 mm and 48 mm shots. This is true of 100 mm and 200 mm shots If you want a systematic and proper evaluation done of the Indigo app it would be very helpful that the metadata is recorded accurately. In analysing the iPhone 17 pro camera apps, I treat the iPhone as three different cameras. In addition I want to further differentiate between 24 mm vs 48 mm and 100 mm vs 200 mm photos. This is the basis for evaluating a camera app ability to record images using 14 mm, 24 mm, 48 mm, 100 mm and 200 mm settings.

By @Sweet Light

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It is definitely clear how this may create some difficulties in a workflow that you describe... we'll look into the EXIF/DNG tags to see if there is perhaps a better way to note the camera characteristics in the image. This is however a bit of a philosophical question: how do you record focal length for a photo which is a combination of some optical properties of the lens AND digital zoom obtained by cropping the sensor? Typically focal lenght entails not just the FOV of the lens, but also such characteristics as minimum focus, depth-of-field, etc. When digitally cropping, only the FOV is changed while everything else remains the same. So we opted to record optical and digital factors separately. I read many articles that came out when iPhone 17 was announced (example LINK) criticizing this introduction of confusion between claiming a focal length and claiming "optical quality", which kind of goes at the heart of what we are talking about. Happy to hear any suggestions you may have on ways to handle this.

S

Sweet Light

Participating Frequently

Thanks for your response. I think philisophical should give way to practicality. I want to know what equivalent focal length setting a photo was taken with. Indigo and the Apple app both have a setting for selecting 48 mm and 200mm (crops of the 24mm and 100mm lens). If I select 48 mm or 200 mm, then I want the metadata to show what my selection was. Why hide this information from the user? Apple does it and Indigo should also. It is not a philisophical consideration, but a simple practical request that will help photographers understand what the capability of their iPhone cameras and apps. Then they can use this knowledge to make better photographs.

- 60 Years Photo Experience 4th Generation Photographer - Digital: various ILC starting 2003, Lighroom 1.0 & PS 6.0 up to current versions, plus InDesign & Illustrator , Analog: 35mm, 120, 4X5, 8X10 size Cameras, 24 inch process camera, Darkroom B&W, E-6 Ektachrome + Type C Prints

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