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P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
May 23, 2025
401 replies
242015 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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M

multipraktik

Participant

Just bought a 16 Pro and have been testing the Indigo camera app. Here are my findings:

Pros:

Fantastic low-light performance; great landscape photos
Excellent dynamic range and detail
No other app currently delivers such impressive 2× and 10× (SR) shots
Clean design
Quick jpg development option in the gallery when shooting DNG only

Cons:

Touch-to-focus is broken; the camera always chooses the focus point on its own
No AE/AF lock
No magnified focus assist in manual mode
No portrait mode
The interface needs work and optimization:
- No way to hide the histogram
- Too many taps to access exposure compensation
- No customizable/favorite buttons (the histogram area could be repurposed for this)
- The “Camera” button in the top-right corner is pointless (repeats Photo/Night switch?)
- Space left &right to the Photo/Night switches could be used for custom buttons
- The app could really use a proper icon (Pi?)

Overall, it’s a great app to experiment with and has huge potential. But in its current state, there’s no way it can replace the stock camera app as the primary shooter.

K

karen_5438

Participant

I never understood this obsessions with megapixels.
I'd take color rendition over megapixels any day and in that regard Indigo reminds me of Foveon camera color rendition (Sigma DP2 as prime example)

S

Sweet Light

Participating Frequently

I agree that color reproduction is essential no matter the amount of megapixels. Indigo definitely provides better color reproduction than the Apple camera app, particularly in the shadow areas. Whether or not megapixels is important depends upon your final output. For social media or around a 16 X 24 inch plus print, then I find 12 mp can be sufficient. Above these sizes the higher 48 mp sensor can provide noticeable detail that is lacking from the 12 mp sensor. According to Adobe it is not possible to do Indigo's computational photography that allows for improved color reproduction from the 48 mp sensor. Hopefully at some point that will change. For now I know that the iPhone 17 pro 12 mp or 48 mp is not a substitute for the full frame 61 mp sensor that I normally use for landscape work. However, I only have the full frame camera with me for planned shoots. I have the iPhone with me all of the time, which opens up a new world of photography opportunities.

- 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

S

Sweet Light

Participating Frequently

I am a new user to Indigo, having just upgraded from an old iPhone XR to the iPhone 17 Pro. I have started testing using the iPhone on a tripod, comparing the native phone app to Indigo. Super Resolution tests: at 200 mm Indigo gives better detail than the Apple app. However, at 48 mm, Indigo smears fine detail. The Apple app has much better detail at 48 mm (12 mp file). I will do more tests to see if these results are typical for the 200 mm and 48 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

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Just a note, I have personally tested SR at 2x and the 8x (17 pro max), and the 10x (15 pro max) and it causes severe mushing and denoising along with artifacts of incomplete imaging (merging and alignment issue) if there are motion detected in the scene. Even the very slight wind movement of foliages causes mush in jpeg AND raw. I have brought this up to the team and they will work on improving the AI algorithm.

S

Sweet Light

Participating Frequently

I am a new user to Indigo, having just upgraded from an old iPhone XR to the iPhone 17 Pro. I have started testing using the iPhone on a tripod, comparing the native phone app to Indigo. On a 14mm photo, I noticed a subtle white band in the sky. The shape of a rainbow, but not a rainbow, just white. Is there a way of sharing the file with Adobe that is not public?

- 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

I am a new user to Indigo, having just upgraded from an old iPhone XR to the iPhone 17 Pro. I have started testing using the iPhone on a tripod, comparing the native phone app to Indigo. On a 14mm photo, I noticed a subtle white band in the sky. The shape of a rainbow, but not a rainbow, just white. Is there a way of sharing the file with Adobe that is not public?

By @Sweet Light

Thank you for reporting this - we are aware of some problems on 17-series devices with lens vignetting calibration and are working with Apple to resolve that. It is possible that the problem is fixed in iOS 26.1, which we are trying to verify. For sharing files privately I will look into that, as we currently do not have a mechanism for it. As you can imagine, we cannot publicly share teammembers' emails.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Also forgot to add, it seems like max zoom is now only 20x vs 25x before to match native cam on iPhone 15 pro max. Can the team make it have zoom up to 40x to match apple's native zoom? Of course with less denoising and mush once the team update the AI algos.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Also forgot to add, it seems like max zoom is now only 20x vs 25x before to match native cam on iPhone 15 pro max. Can the team make it have zoom up to 40x to match apple's native zoom? Of course with less denoising and mush once the team update the AI algos.

By @nhan_8084

Since we only get a 12MP image resolution in bayer raw, if we were to zoom to 40x we'd need to employ 10x digital zoom, which would leave only 0.12MP of input size to work with. This is not enough to create a meaningful 12MP result photo without using hallucination (i.e., Generative AI). Therefore we are limiting the digital zoom to 5x.

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

My guess is apple's 40x isn't quite generative AI, but them actually using a frame of the 48mp along with the digital zoom of the 12mp bayered version? I couldn't figure out if they used the entire ISZ zoom because I couldn't not see a change in banding position in viewfinder when pointing to an OLED screen. Can you verify on your end?

N

nhan_8084

Known Participant

Took this pic on my iPhone 17 pro max using the latest Indigo version, the jpeg white balance is not accurate. It did proper white balance to white but it isn't scene accurate as it nuked the 4000K softwhite yellowish hue cast. I have attached the auto jpeg, raw, and correct post processed jpg.

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s2g2ju1x70d0nrtmnmqyu/Photo-Nov-01-2025-9-26-14-AM.dng?rlkey=osywx60xb7netoz8sz0l7xah6&st=4eu7gm8x&dl=0

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Took this pic on my iPhone 17 pro max using the latest Indigo version, the jpeg white balance is not accurate. It did proper white balance to white but it isn't scene accurate as it nuked the 4000K softwhite yellowish hue cast. I have attached the auto jpeg, raw, and correct post processed jpg.

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s2g2ju1x70d0nrtmnmqyu/Photo-Nov-01-2025-9-26-14-AM.dng?rlkey=osywx60xb7netoz8sz0l7xah6&st=4eu7gm8x&dl=0

By @nhan_8084

Thank you for sharing these - I will pass them to the team to review.

W

WangZheng

Participant

Thanks so much for the app, the result it produces remind some of my favorite phone photography taken on nexus. I wish I could use the project indigo as my main camera app but the only problem stopping me doing so right now is that the app opens significantly slower than native camera app. It not only has a logo screen for half second, but a long lag for camera to be active (blackout at the beginning of entering the interface. the native camera app does that too but with a much shorter duration) I do a lot street photography, and this makes the flow sometimes awkward. Not to say taking photo of my cats, right now I only have the confidence to use indigo when they are sleeping.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Thanks so much for the app, the result it produces remind some of my favorite phone photography taken on nexus. I wish I could use the project indigo as my main camera app but the only problem stopping me doing so right now is that the app opens significantly slower than native camera app. It not only has a logo screen for half second, but a long lag for camera to be active (blackout at the beginning of entering the interface. the native camera app does that too but with a much shorter duration) I do a lot street photography, and this makes the flow sometimes awkward. Not to say taking photo of my cats, right now I only have the confidence to use indigo when they are sleeping.

By @WangZheng

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Indigo. Indeed, the native camera app will load the fastest. For Indigo we need to prepare a few things before the camera can be used, and they take some time. We will keep optimizing the startup sequence to squeeze any performance we can out of it. For reference, not all ways to start the app operate equally fast: in my personal experience, starting the app from the Lock/Home screen or with the Action button are the fastest methods, while using the Camera app or the Control center shortcut are slower.

T

toni_0822

Participant

Hellooo, just wanted to very kindly ask for a little update about Android compatibility. And if the compatibility with older devices will depend mainly on the android version, the ram, the processing power, camera hardware/cpu or just all of it.

Thanks very much in advance 🙂

T

toni_0822

Participant

*With the first question I mean the general android port and the second question is more about a very rough estimation which specific device tiers and generations may be compatible. If even old android devices can be supported as long as they have a big ram to compensate missing performance, for example.

T

toni_0822

Participant

😥

J

johndoc1

Participating Frequently

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:

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

Appreciate any help on the 17Pro.

John D

T

toni_0822

Participant

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

Thanks for the reply. Bummer.

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

Known Participant

@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.

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