P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Adobe Employee

I have one photo in my Apple Photos library whcih has bad metadata and has 2028 as its date. So after I take a photo with Indigo and click on the photo thumbnail in the bottom left my future dated photo appears instead of the photo I just took. Obviousely a problem on my side but...

iOS 26.0 (23A5318C)

iPhone 16 Pro Max

By @phydie

This is as expected - Indigo is reading the camera roll to find the images for the filmstrip. Under normal circumstances, it is expected that the last image captured with Indigo is the newest, and that will be shown. If you have a photo "from the future", then there is no way for the system to know that is not what you want shown. We are working on adding album support for Indigo captures which may help with this.

Participating Frequently

If I set an exposure compensation value via the pro settings in the app, next time I restart Indigo, that EC value persists, even though the app is no longer in 'pro' mode. I would have thought the correct behaviour should be either

Persist the EC value on restart *and* go back into 'pro' mode
Stay in auto mode on restart with the EC value reset to zero.

Lee

Adobe Employee

If I set an exposure compensation value via the pro settings in the app, next time I restart Indigo, that EC value persists, even though the app is no longer in 'pro' mode. I would have thought the correct behaviour should be either

Persist the EC value on restart *and* go back into 'pro' mode

Stay in auto mode on restart with the EC value reset to zero.

Lee

By @leed24280355

Lee, I tried reproducing this issue but couldn't (assuming I understood you correctly). I tried the following:

Set the EC to +3 in Pro controls
Pause or kill Indigo
Start Indigo
Observed that the viewfinder may start brighter (it perhaps uses the last used exposure time and ISO values), but it quickly recovers and exposes correctly for the scene.

Are you noticing a different behavior than that? If so, can you elaborate more on the exact steps you use and exactly what you are observing as a result. Thanks

Participating Frequently

Hi Boris

I can confirm that I see the same behaviour as you. What I think I was observing was that, after a restart of Indigo, it is indeed in auto mode (which is fine) but if you press the icon to go back into Pro mode, you get the same settings that you mave made in the previous instance of Pro mode. So any changes to settings (EC or shutter speed, iso etc) in Pro mode are 'sticky' and are retained for the next time you go into 'Pro' mode.

I assume this is the expected behaviour? It just means that if you don't use Pro mode for a while and then click on the icon for it, you may forget that settings have been made there and retained. Perhaps this is just an awareness thing on the part of the user, one can always do a manual reset when entering Pro mode - to be fair the icons for any changed settyings are highlighted in yellow, so I guess it is easy to see.

Another option is maybe to have a setting that switches on/off 'reset Pro mode settings on restart' or similar.

Lee

Participating Frequently

Is anyone using PI on an iPhone 16e? If so, how does it run and what zoom options are available?

Thanks

Lee

Adobe Employee

Is anyone using PI on an iPhone 16e? If so, how does it run and what zoom options are available?

Thanks

Lee

By @leed24280355

On 16e the app should run just fine. Since that device has only one lens, the zoom options are 1x and 2x, with maximum zoom being 5x. For the selfie camera they remain the same.

P

pmattos92

Participant

Thank you to the team working on this app, it's so refreshing to see an app that leans even more on computational photography instead of less like so many other apps do. I love the app and am very excited to see what the next updates will bring! I have a few suggestions/feature requests and one question.

It's currently very hard to nail focus when adjusting it manually. It would be really helpful if the app had green/yellow/red focus peaking to help with that.
When shooting in auto mode, it's hard to get both the appropriate focus and exposure right as similarly to the native Camera app, tapping on the screen will set both at the same time. I would love it if tap to focus and set exposure could be separated (possibly with a setting to control this behaviour), allowing me to tap to set both, and then drag out only the exposure or focus to another area on the screen. Check out ProCamera's interface for a great example of this. This would help me nail both settings 99% of the time and not even need to resort to manual mode.
Eposure compensation should be easier to access. This is a frequently used setting, even in auto mode, to justify it being easily accessible without having to go into the manual settings menu. I would suggest moving the "Photo/Night" mode toggle to the side, and putting the "+/-" button front and center right above the shutter button. Again, look at ProCamera's different interface modes for great examples on how to solve this.
If this app is going to rely so heavily on computational photography to the point of overheating most modern phones, a setting should be added to let us choose how much computation we actually want. You don't need to expose the exact parameters or optimizations used behvind the scenes, but just let me choose between 2 or 3 presets that customize how intensive the processing will be. Phrasing this in terms of what trade-offs could be expected could help communicate what each setting entails. Something like "Speed ----- Balanced ----- Quality" – where Quality would be the existing processing that tends to overheat phones, and the other two could be less intensive versions of that, with other priorities in mind.

Question

On that last note, like many people, my only "problem" with the app is how hot my iPhone 16 Pro gets when using it. This makes the whole experience poor, as it either gets uncomfortably hot to hold or the app will just start freezing under heavy load. While my suggestion above is one way I think this could be addressed in the future, I have found a workaround that works with the current version of the app, and wanted to check if this is a viable solution, in your opinion: I found that when I turn on "Low Power Mode" in the iOS Battery settings, the app will make my iPhone significantly less hot during use. This is expected, as Low Power Mode will, among other things, restrict processing and turn off the HDRness of the display in order to use less battery power. This also inevitably means the app will take a little longer to process the final shots, but I would say it's an overall better experience while using it. So my question is: does running the app with Low Power Mode turned on cause the app to compromise on the quality of the captured photos in any way? I think this is a viable workaround until the app can be optimized to not overheat most phones, or until chips get more powerful to run it without any issues, BUT I will only rely on it if that means there's no compromise on the quality of the output.

Thank you again for your attention to the feedback shared here, and for making this awesome app!

Adobe Employee

By @pmattos92

Thank you for sharing detailed observations and suggestions. I'll do my best to comment or answer your questions:

Getting manual focus right is tricky, I fully agree. The "focus peaking" feature you are mentioning is nee impossible to implement well. Basically, it is impossible to detect "peak sharpness" of a pixel or image region from a single image. You would need to analize the same scene but with multiple images, captured with focus shifting (i.e., a focus stack). Furthermore, this would heavily depend on the amount of noise in the image signal and zoom level. We tried implementing the feature and doing some quality tuning, but basically it ended up not being precise enough to be useful, which is why we didn't ship it and relied on the focus loupe in Pro controls.
Improving focus and exposure in Auto mode is on our todo list. There are several aspects of it: separating the tap locations for focus and exposure, accounting for the digital zoom (this required changes in iOS which will be available in iOS 26; we will add them then), and adding the exposure compensation slider. All of these are on our roadmap.
As mentioned in #2, we will add EC to Auto mode in one of the upcoming releases.
This is an interesting suggestion. We are working on adding support for user-customizable post-processing parameters, but for computational photography this is for now accessible from the Pro Controls. Namely, in Night Mode, the last Pro Control on the right exposes the Frames To Merge slider: the fewer frames one uses, the faster processing will be, and vice versa. We can think about some more high-level app setting, but in truth, with Indigo we are trying to push the limits of computational photography and of iPhone hardware. We have quite a few additional optimizations to try which may limit or negate the need for customizing the amount of computational photography.

Regarding your question, low power mode should not compromize the quality of Indigo captures much, if at all. There may be some impact however, primarily with Zero Shutter Lag captures in Photo mode, where the rate of raw frames the app is able to get from the OS may go down. If there are fast moving scenes, there may be fewer frames to merge, resulting in noisier captures. Other than that, note that in low power mode your display will not show HDR properly, so images may not look good until you disable the low power mode.

Adobe Employee

By @pmattos92

Regarding your question, low power mode should not compromize the quality of Indigo captures much, if at all. There may be some impact however, primarily with Zero Shutter Lag captures in Photo mode, where the rate of raw frames the app is able to get from the OS may go down. If there are fast moving scenes, there may be fewer frames to merge, resulting in noisier captures. Other than that, note that in low power mode your display will not show HDR properly, so images may not look good until you disable the low power mode.

Clarifying the low power mode a bit. Regarding ZSL capture, we suspect there may be impact on the frame rate of raw frames we may get from the system, but that is not confirmed. In reality, there may be no impact. And on the HDR side of things, the captured images will be processed just the same, it's just that the OS will disable the HDR display output (as it consumes a lot of power) so the images will temporarily look poorer. If you disable low power mode, then those same images will look just fine.

Participating Frequently

If I use Indigo to take a DNG+JPG and then use LR Mobile to import the images, it will only import the DNGs. The JPGs are not imported to LR Mobile. Is there anyway to ensure that both versions are imported or can this be added as a feature to LR Mobile? I have the same issue when trying to import DNG+JPG pairs created by other apps (such as Halide).

My workaround is to open each DNG+JPG in Apple Photos and use the share option to Edit in Lightroom. That then brings the JPG into LR Mobile but this has to be done one image at a time, which is cumbersome.

Adobe Employee

If I use Indigo to take a DNG+JPG and then use LR Mobile to import the images, it will only import the DNGs. The JPGs are not imported to LR Mobile. Is there anyway to ensure that both versions are imported or can this be added as a feature to LR Mobile? I have the same issue when trying to import DNG+JPG pairs created by other apps (such as Halide).

My workaround is to open each DNG+JPG in Apple Photos and use the share option to Edit in Lightroom. That then brings the JPG into LR Mobile but this has to be done one image at a time, which is cumbersome.

By @leed24280355

Thank you for sharing this. Typically users want to import only one of the two, which is why Lightroom for mobile focuses on the DNG workflow. Having said that, one way to speed importing JPEGs is to multi-select several images in Apple Photos and then share with Lightroom. This way, all of them will be shared in one go, instead of going one by one.

Participating Frequently

Actually, if I take concurrent DNG+JPG images, I usually want to import both. I often do this so I can compare the DNG to the JPG to see how good (or not) the JPGs are. With a real camera you can often shoot RAW + JPG at the same time and LR or LRC enables you to import both side by side. So it would be really cool if LRM could add this as an option.

I know of one app for iPhone that names the RAW and JPG slightly differently and in this case they appear as seperate files to LRM.

Lee

Participating Frequently

There is a bug whereby if you Reset Edits in LR on an Indigo DNG, the Profile changes from 'Indigo' to 'Adobe Color'. I was hoping that this would be fixed in the latest LR 8.5. Is this a bug that needs a change to LR to fix or is it an issue with the DNG that needs an update of Indigo to fix?

Adobe Employee

There is a bug whereby if you Reset Edits in LR on an Indigo DNG, the Profile changes from 'Indigo' to 'Adobe Color'. I was hoping that this would be fixed in the latest LR 8.5. Is this a bug that needs a change to LR to fix or is it an issue with the DNG that needs an update of Indigo to fix?

By @leed24280355

This is a bit of a tricky question, as there are several versions of the DNG that could be used when the user wants to reset. Two most important ones are a version as intended by the camera (i.e., with the Indigo profile and with other rendering preferences set by the camera), and what the user's default rendering settings are. So when you click on 'Reset' the system cannot know which version you want to see. That is why there are several resetting options in ACR and Lightroom like "Reset to Default" and "Reset to Open". A recommendation when editing is to save versions, so you can always go back to a version that is meaningful to you. Others on the forum may have more helpful suggestions.

Adobe Employee

Thanks for the detailed explanations but I think perhaps my use case is rather simple. The Reset Edits or View Original options in any version of LR should show the image exactly as it appeared when first imported. This is the behaviour with any other file, RAW or otherwise.

For example, with an iPhone ProRaw file, LRM imports it and sets the Profile to Apple ProRaw. I can make edits and even change the Profile if I wish but Reset Edits always returns the image to the original state as when imported with the Profile set to Apple ProRaw. For this file type, Apple ProRaw appears as an option on the Profile drop-down, so if I have chosen some other profile (such as Adobe Standard), I can manually re-select Apple ProRaw to re-apply it if I wish.

With Indigo DNGs:

There is no option on the Profile drop-down to manually reselect the Indigo profile
If I reset the edits or view original, the original image as imported is *not* displayed because the profile reverts to Adobe Color.

This was all mentioned here early after the release of Indigo and I think the response was that you would check with the LR team to find a fix.

Thanks

Lee

With Indigo DNGs:

There is no option on the Profile drop-down to manually reselect the Indigo profile

If I reset the edits or view original, the original image as imported is *not* displayed because the profile reverts to Adobe Color.

This was all mentioned here early after the release of Indigo and I think the response was that you would check with the LR team to find a fix.

Thanks

Lee

By @leed24280355

I am following up with the Lr team on this, and we'll work on making the workflow better. Stay tuned.

R

realrev_

Participant

Here I want to share the night scene that my friend took in Japan. The Indigo camera is really great.

However, the problem is that sometimes it takes a quiet long time to open, or even just freezes. This problem has only recently occurred on my iPhone 16 pro max.

Adobe Employee

Here I want to share the night scene that my friend took in Japan. The Indigo camera is really great.

However, the problem is that sometimes it takes a quiet long time to open, or even just freezes. This problem has only recently occurred on my iPhone 16 pro max.

By @realrev_

This is a very nice photo - thank you for sharing! Regarding the app seemingly slowing down, a couple of questions: did you by any chance update your OS on the device? We have noticed issues with some iOS 26 beta versions (e.g., beta 6), so that could be a part of it. Second question is whether you rebooted your device recently? It can help sometimes. If the issue persist please reach out again and we'll debug further.

R

realrev_

Participant

Hi Boris,

Thank you for getting back to me.

My device is currently on the latest iOS 18; I haven’t tried iOS 26 yet.

After rebooting my device, the issue has disappeared.

It is worth mentioning that the Indigo camera can produce some degree of purple fringing when photographing subjects with clearly defined edges, which can be rather bothersome in photography. That said, as someone who has been using Leica digital cameras for over a decade as a hobby, I remain very satisfied with the Indigo.

Best wishes

N

nhan_8084

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade I took a 2x SR and 10x SR on a scene with foliages to see how it handles fine details and I noticed some weird things. Either the merge didn't align right, or the fill AI didn't apply right bc there seems to be random radial blurring like faux bokeh look. Almost like bad portrait mode bokeh. I will attach raws for inspection, the SOOC jpeg, and crops of the issue place in lrm.

heres the 2x raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vhka3jbknfc2hop0bl04w/IMG_9513.dng?rlkey=sg4ht215fnxepzs3knqjehnva&st=wyo5rr47&dl=0

here's the 10x raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5adm0dma9uzumqc5jib26/IMG_9518.dng?rlkey=0fr27v0ipw8ns1ejdrtwm18v5&st=aaibex6y&dl=0

Edit: Forgot to add that the 1x, 2x processing took approximately 6-7s after shutter pressed. Could this be improved upon?