P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mj9f1or4izxvmbkxd2q73/IMG_9970.dng?rlkey=t7t9kf01gf7wlaq13320uf7a2&st=f1pkmqyz&dl=0

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade I took a 5x shot, handheld, as stable with two hands as I could, seems like OIS/EIS is def not as good with the tele as the main. Is it possible to fix?

another note, 5x has a lot of artifacts similar to stock google camera, weird chroma blotching that is due to improper noise models used. If I use a custom noise model profile it fixes it in google camera, but I do not know how to even go about that for Indigo. See attached crops for areas of artifacts.

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade I took a 5x shot, handheld, as stable with two hands as I could, seems like OIS/EIS is def not as good with the tele as the main. Is it possible to fix?

another note, 5x has a lot of artifacts similar to stock google camera, weird chroma blotching that is due to improper noise models used. If I use a custom noise model profile it fixes it in google camera, but I do not know how to even go about that for Indigo. See attached crops for areas of artifacts.

By @nhan_8084

Thank you for sharing. On the stability of the 5x shot, did you use Photo or Night mode? If you used Photo mode then there is no OIS, as that is only available in the Night mode. Furthermore, 3rd parties have no ways to influence the OIS: it works as it works and is not tunable. In either mode EIS is used only for stabilization of the viewfinder, but the processing later "stabilizes" implicitly by using aligning & merging of the frames. We'll keep tuning those algorithms.

Regarding noise, we are updating the noise calibration for all lenses on all supported devices. It's still TBD how much impact that will have on the results.

Overall, note that 5x camera is a much poorer performer than the 1x, which is why Apple is under-the-hood often silently switching from 5x to 1x to improve image quality, for example in low light situations.

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade That shot was using non night as it's bright day. Should I use night mode regardless to use the algorithm for align and proper merge? I didn't know those artifacts were caused from improper merge and alignment! As mentioned, those artifacts are fixed by using custom noise model values when I use google camera mod apk version on Pixels and non-pixel devices. Glad to hear noise profiles are being improved upon.

In regard to the 5x switching to the 1x crop, yes all OEM does that unless you force it in pro modes typically since main has faster aperature and bigger sensor. Although I have had good experience with apple's stock camera not switching to main unless it's extremely low lit scene, but then again who uses tele at those scenes!

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3lmut71cuvpiwul6vugxo/IMG_9812.dng?rlkey=vjij72aqh6z6r0ult1b3fdmd9&st=znhyajn5&dl=0

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade Took some very low lighting shot in main and tele. I will attach tele raw, sooc jpeg, and processed raw. It seems like to me hdr isn't very good on both when dealing with led like street lamps and led signs on buildings and cars. Is it possible for the team to work more on this in jpeg and raw?

If you noticed there are some artifacts in the edges in the tele sample I sent, it seems like vignette correction issues? There are noises but the noises are very weird, either vignetting correction issues or noise models issues. Also, the processed jpeg I did in terms of noise reduction to sharpness is how I like sooc jpg to be at.

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade did you and the team had a chance to look at this sample yet?

Adobe Employee

Hello everyone - Project Indigo team would like to thank all who are visiting this forum, sharing their experiences, and helping us work on improving the app. We are aware that it has been a while since the last update. The next release is very much in progress and is scheduled to go live in the next 3 weeks, so stay tuned. We are a small team, but we are working very hard to add improvements to the app. Since Indigo uses a custom image processing pipeline, some improvements may take longer then one would anticipate, since we are not able to just call an Apple API and expose some new functonality: we often have to build it from scratch.

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????????_4983

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade Will this update primarily be bug fixes and performance improvements?

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade Will this update primarily be bug fixes and performance improvements?

By @????????_4983

We are working on adding some user-requested features, such as DNG-only capture. While that sounds easy, in reality it is a bit tricky to do with the right experience. There will also be selfie mirroring, a far easier thing to add. A lot of improvements are under-the-hood as performance and stability are still our number 1 priorities.

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention a bug with Indigo and saw it again last night to remind me. I was using a led headlight last night to do some yard work and used Indigo to shoot some picture. This was late about 11 pm so I used the headlight to see, when Indigo was running it looks like the headlight caused some interference with the app as it was displaying vertical scrolling bands, like refresh rate bands. The bands are also captured in the picture as lines/bands. I noticed that this behavior also happened back in July when I had a magsafe battery bank 5000mAh attached while running Indigo, it showed banding across the viewfinder and also capturing had those bandings.

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention a bug with Indigo and saw it again last night to remind me. I was using a led headlight last night to do some yard work and used Indigo to shoot some picture. This was late about 11 pm so I used the headlight to see, when Indigo was running it looks like the headlight caused some interference with the app as it was displaying vertical scrolling bands, like refresh rate bands. The bands are also captured in the picture as lines/bands. I noticed that this behavior also happened back in July when I had a magsafe battery bank 5000mAh attached while running Indigo, it showed banding across the viewfinder and also capturing had those bandings.

By @nhan_8084

This is LED banding - depending on the light flicker frequency, it may cause such lines (i.e., bands) to appear in the image. We'll look into how to improve the app in presence of flickering light sources.

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention banding do not happen in stock app on both the magsafe battery nor the LED headlight, but Indigo both occured.

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade Will indigo's future updates support iphone 11,12,13 which are now limited due to their RAM? If not then how does the same algorithm which Marc developed for google - HDR+ work on even low-end android phones?

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade Will indigo's future updates support iphone 11,12,13 which are now limited due to their RAM? If not then how does the same algorithm which Marc developed for google - HDR+ work on even low-end android phones?

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

Indigo requires a lot more memory because we are, for now, more interested in developing and testing cutting edge computational photography than we are in supporting older and older device - it is an experimental app, after all. We can reduce the amount of compute we do if the devices are less powerful and enable them to run Indigo, but that is less important for the time being.

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade What is your take on this a quad bayer 48mp sensor like on the 16 pro at 2x if you could get the 12mp crop not like right now when apple doesnt allow the full 48mp thus the 2x crop even on 16 pro is limited to 3mp do you think if apple allowed the full 48mp input that if we crop the 48mp quad bayer to 2x and use super res zoom on the 2x crop it would get the same detail as a 12mp bayer at 2x crop because of the lens resolution to resolve detail or the 48mp quad bayer will produce more detailed 2x zoom? Thanks!

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade What is your take on this a quad bayer 48mp sensor like on the 16 pro at 2x if you could get the 12mp crop not like right now when apple doesnt allow the full 48mp thus the 2x crop even on 16 pro is limited to 3mp do you think if apple allowed the full 48mp input that if we crop the 48mp quad bayer to 2x and use super res zoom on the 2x crop it would get the same detail as a 12mp bayer at 2x crop because of the lens resolution to resolve detail or the 48mp quad bayer will produce more detailed 2x zoom? Thanks!

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

(What follows is my 2c, not the team's official position on the matter) Typically the spatial resolution of a quad bayer sensor is lower than that of the bayer sensor, because each 2x2 group of the same color is under the same microlens, so technically they see the same part of the scene. This is why quad bayer sensor are really intended for lower resolution capture, but using the 4 pixels in a group to either recover better dynamic range (by exposing each differently), or by getting lower noise (by exposing each the same and averaging). Having said that, it is possible that there is extra information in each 2x2 group due to imperfections of the microlenses which could be exploited - I am not sure how likely that is, and if so, how one could use it for better super-resolution algorithms. In any case, there are 3 possible ways for the center 12MP of a 48MP sensor to be exposed:

without any modifications (we get 12MP quad bayer)
with "remosaicing" (convert single frame 12MP quad bayer to 12MP bayer raw)
with stacking (use computational photography and several frames to recover the 12MP bayer raw details).

None of these are perfect. For 1, we would need to develop new algorithms that deal with quad bayer. For 2, there would be quality issues. And for 3, it would be slow and it would have Apple's computational photography baked into the bayer raw, which we wouldn't want.

Participating Frequently

So if i understood correctly that means super res zoom for a quad bayer 2x crop wont deliver more detail than super res zoom 2x crop of a 12mp bayer given the same sensor size on both?

David 101

Participating Frequently

I have found that the Print option is greyed out on my Windows 11 PC when I try to print a Project Indigo image from Photoshop. I open in Adobe Camera Raw first. Changing the Profile and SR and HDR stops do not seem to help.

The unprocessed jpg from Indigo can be printed however.

Raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0tf04t1e8g7je7dq9s82p/IMG_9664.dng?rlkey=t3lqf6kkqlg8bpl5dvbs8om4c&st=kb1rhzr6&dl=0

Known Participant

@BorisTheBlade I took a night shot with hdr scene, people in motions as well, and noticed the skyline has halos and overly weird skies coloring (some blotches). Can this be addressed? I will attach the raw, sooc jpeg, and post processed.

Adobe Employee

@BorisTheBlade I took a night shot with hdr scene, people in motions as well, and noticed the skyline has halos and overly weird skies coloring (some blotches). Can this be addressed? I will attach the raw, sooc jpeg, and post processed.

By @nhan_8084

Will look into it. Thanks for reporting.

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade Do you think super res zoom when it gets better can be made to work for the whole image without doing a crop like right now it is only triggered when using 2x zoom or more but the resolution improvements are dramatic and match that of the 2x zoom of the 16 pro with the main app. My point is do you think a bayer 12mp sensor like the one in the iphone 14 can match the zoom quality of a quad bayer 48mp sensor like on the 16 pro when using super res zoom on both sensors? Because in my view they will produce the same results because 48mp quad bayer has 12mp of color resolution and as you said super res zoom only improves resolution when the lens can recover more resolution than the sensor can provide and also lets not even talk about the smaller pixels on the 48mp quad bayer and diffraction limitations. What do you think and is it possible for this super res zoom to be made to the full sensor not a crop and produce a 48mp image even on a 12mp bayer sensor like iphone 14 base? Thanks in advance!

Adobe Employee

What do you think and is it possible for this super res zoom to be made to the full sensor not a crop and produce a 48mp image even on a 12mp bayer sensor like iphone 14 base?

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

We are experimenting with this. The biggest obstacle is performance - to get 48MP out of 12MP is roughly equivalent to getting 12MP our of 3MP 4 times. In other words, it is expected to be 4x slower. Once we are happy with the performance and image quality for such a use-case, we will work on adding a higher resolution mode to the app. Stay tuned.

michaljanata

Inspiring

sorry if it is already answerd, it is very long and not structured thread

I have found that some DNG images imported to Lightroom directly from Indigo have half size resolution than original shot with Indigo and I'm not sure why (iPhone 15)

edit: now I know all shots with 2x zoom are imported half size in Lightroom... so lots of images lost, I didnt expect such behavior