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Rikk Flohr-Retired
Adobe Employee
May 23, 2025 6:55 PM UTC

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

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: 

 

    1416 replies

    Participant
    Oct 28, 2026 10:58 PM UTC

    Boris — two new facts since my posts here, both public:

     

    1. An Apple DTS engineer replied on Developer Forums thread 853978 and said FB25352517 is open and under investigation as an enhancement request.

     

    2. He named the four specifics that would make it more useful (my numbering): (a) "The devices and cameras you need this on." (b) "Whether you capture single frames or bursts, and the burst length and frame rate your pipeline needs." (c) "The exact per-frame values your pipeline depends on, such as the color filter layout, black and white levels, exposure and ISO, and timestamps for alignment." (d) "A short sample that shows what the current Bayer RAW path returns on a specific device and iOS version."

     

    I have posted a supplement answering those in order on that thread.

     

    I have added that supplement to FB25352517 via Add More Information.

     

    His other point was that if other developers need the same capability, filing their own enhancement requests helps engineering understand the demand. If Adobe files its own, or puts Indigo's burst and per-frame specifics on the record, that strengthens exactly the count he described.

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 11:53 PM UTC

    Thank you for sharing this. We have filed a similar request in the past, but have been told that it is unlikely to happen. Who knows: maybe it happens. 🤞

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    Participant
    Oct 28, 2026 7:57 PM UTC

    Hi Boris,

     

    Following up on my earlier post. I filed an AVFoundation enhancement request for a supported full-resolution Quad Bayer RAW or mosaic capture path, based on what Apple said at WWDC26.

     

    Apple Feedback: FB25352517

    Developer Forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/853978

     

    I kept it about the general need — custom demosaic, multi-frame registration, denoising, HDR fusion, SR — not about a bigger zoom number.

     

    If NextCam thinks this would help Indigo, feel free to reference the thread or the FB through whatever channel you use with Apple engineering. And if I got the data path wrong, or asked for the wrong primitive, I'd rather hear that and fix the request.

     

    On the Indigo side, I'm still most interested in 12x on the 4x telephoto with the binned RAW you already have. 16x feels like an experimental or static-scene mode, if it works at all.

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    Participant
    Oct 28, 2026 6:07 PM UTC

    the app has closed by itself on my iPhone 

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:41 PM UTC

    You mean it just crashed? Can you share more information: which device, which Indigo version, what were you doing with the device/app just before. Thank you, and apologies for an unpleasant experience.

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    Participant
    Oct 28, 2026 5:52 PM UTC

    Hi Boris and NextCam team,

     

    I moved from an iPhone 16 Pro Max to an 18 Pro Max and noticed Indigo tops out at 8x for me now. The 16 Pro Max let me use 10x SR.

     

    I worked through the geometry before posting, because I didn't want this to just be a request for a bigger number. On the 16 Pro Max the telephoto was 12 MP, 5x / 120 mm, so 10x was a 2x linear crop before SR. On the 18 Pro Max it's 48 MP, 4x / 100 mm, and Apple calls the 8x / 200 mm result 12 MP "optical-quality." If Indigo is getting the 12 MP binned Bayer RAW I'd expect from that Quad Bayer sensor, then 8x is the same 2x crop again.

     

    Which means 16x isn't a free extension. 12x would be a 3x crop, about 1.33 MP of source area left per frame. 16x would be a 4x crop, about 0.75 MP. I get that that's a much harder reconstruction problem.

     

    I'm still wondering if there's room past 8x. Burst SR is working from real sub-pixel shifts across frames, not upscaling a single crop. For mostly static scenes, could an extended mode work — 12x as the real target, 16x maybe as a Labs thing? Longer burst, pickier frame selection, stricter motion rejection. Slower is fine with me if the detail is actually there.

     

    The other half of this is an Apple API question. In the WWDC26 Camera and Photo Technologies Group Lab, Apple said full-resolution Quad Bayer RAW isn't available yet. RAW from a Quad Bayer sensor is the binned output right now, a full-resolution version would need the decoding support around it, and they told developers who want it to file Feedback Assistant requests.

     

    So: does NextCam actually want full-resolution Quad Bayer RAW or mosaic access for Indigo? Has Adobe filed a Feedback request for it already? If there's an FB number you can share, I'll file my own and reference it. And if you haven't, would those extra sensor samples actually help your SR work, or is the binned output not the limiting factor here?

     

    I'm not after a 16x button that just upsamples. I want more real reach, and if part of the ceiling is an Apple API, I'd rather get a clear request in front of both teams than guess.

     

    Thanks for reading this far. Indigo is one of the few camera apps where I find myself wanting to understand what the pipeline is doing.

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 29, 2026 12:03 AM UTC

    Thank you for your detailed post. I have some questions/comments though:

    1. What do you mean by “Indigo tops out at 8x for me now”?
    2. At 8x, Indigo is getting a 3MP bayer raw image. Which is why we employ Burst SR to get that back to 12MP. But if you keep zooming more, you are essentially cropping that 12MP without possibility to recover resolution. So at 16x you only have 3MP.
      1. We max out at 5x digital zoom, as we didn’t want to do simple upscale which does not preserve resolution past that point.
      2. Note that you can get 10x digital zoom if you use Macro with 0.5x lens: then you can zoom in to 5x without changing the lens.
    3. Quad Bayer data is very tricky to work with - to be honest, if Apple gave us access, it would take us quite a bit of time to take proper advantage of it. Would still be nice to have the option, but it would not be an immediate win by any stretch of the imagination.
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    Participating Frequently
    Oct 26, 2026 3:50 PM UTC

    When’s the next update dropping?

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:42 PM UTC

    One update is scheduled for this week with more minor improvements. A bigger one coming in the following 2-3 weeks - stay tuned!

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    Participating Frequently
    Oct 28, 2026 11:29 PM UTC

    Awesome! Looking forward to what you guys have been cooking up!

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    Halicarnassus
    Participating Frequently
    Oct 23, 2026 2:55 PM UTC

    Please add the capability to turn off the HDR globally in the settings. Thanks 

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:46 PM UTC

    Can you elaborate a bit more what you mean by that? If you are concerned about SDR in images, that is perfectly preserved in both our JPEGs and DNGs - you can just turn off HDR in Camera Raw or Lightroom, for example, and see our SDR rendering. If it is something else, I would like to know more details. Thank you

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    Participant
    Oct 16, 2026 9:11 PM UTC

    Hi team,

    I'm reporting a bug with Super Resolution in Project Indigo.

    Device: iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 27.0.1
    App version: [1.1.3]

    Problem: When I take a photo in Super Resolution mode, the resulting image is corrupted. It looks like a grid of solid blue tiles with noisy, glitchy artifacts along the tile seams (screenshot attached). It seems the tiled processing returns an empty or broken result, and the app stitches it together anyway.

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:42 PM UTC

    This was fixed in iOS 27.2 - please download it and give it a try.

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    Participant
    Oct 16, 2026 9:11 PM UTC

    Hi team,

    I'm reporting a bug with Super Resolution in Project Indigo.

    Device: iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 27.0.1
    App version: [your Indigo version]

    Problem: When I take a photo in Super Resolution mode, the resulting image is corrupted. It looks like a grid of solid blue tiles with noisy, glitchy artifacts along the tile seams (screenshot attached). It seems the tiled processing returns an empty or broken result, and the app stitches it together anyway.

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    Participant
    Oct 3, 2026 4:16 AM UTC

    After the update to iOS 27, the X6 camera no longer works on iPhone 13 Pro. Generates a blue image and vertical lines without any meaning.

     

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    Participant
    Oct 10, 2026 4:11 PM UTC

    After trying more Lightroom functions, the problem is not only in the X6 camera, it is in any camera that uses SR, both macro and X2. The other functions work perfectly.

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:43 PM UTC

    This was fixed on iOS 27.2. Please try it out and let us know if it now works. Thank you!

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    Participating Frequently
    Sep 30, 2026 3:23 PM UTC

    Hello, I assume there will be more updates to take better advantage of the iPhone 18 Pros? Presumably the algorithms will need to be updated for the new main sensor, and to use the widest aperture at low light?

    I know Indigo works at a low level, so I can’t help but treat its current output with some suspicion because the low level details of the 18 Pros main camera have changed.

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    Adobe Employee
    Oct 28, 2026 6:44 PM UTC

    We are shipping an updated noise model for iPhone 18 devices soon, which should already improve the image quality. We are also doing a deeper characterization of the image quality with varying aperture settings. It will take us some time to properly optimize our AE algorithm to take full advantage of it, but we will release aperture support in stages. Please stay tuned.

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