P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 23, 2025
408 replies
244535 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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nhan_8084

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.

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BorisTheBlade

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.

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nhan_8084

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.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

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?

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BorisTheBlade

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.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

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!

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BorisTheBlade

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.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

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.

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nhan_8084

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.

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

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BorisTheBlade

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.

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powerful_Elixir5E29

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!

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BorisTheBlade

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

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

By @michaljanata

Check whether you have multi-frame super-resolution turned on or off. If it is on, then you will have a 'SR' badge above the 2x zoom button in the UI. If it is off, then there will be no badge. Without super-resolution enabled, digital zoom just crops the sensor and you lose resolution. With it enabled, at 2x you still get 12MP DNG image. Note that even with super-resolution enabled, if you zoom more than 2x, cropping behavior will return: at 4x for example, you would get a half-resolution DNG. Hope this helps clarify the situation.

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David31709443nyi8

Inspiring

I have a home grown DNG file "developer" program that I try to keep up-to-date. I have made a couple of updates to it to support Project Indigo files (like WarpRectilinear2). I have noticed that in some instances the DefaultCropSize tag in an Indigo file is all zeros. That is, the numerator and denominator values in the two rational values are zero, leading to NaN values. I'm running Indigo on an iPhone 15 (not a Pro or Pro Max). The problem seems confined to the front camera and the back wide camera (not the ultra-wide camera and not the wide camera in 2X mode). I import the Indigo files directly from the phone into the latest version of Lightroom Classic, then run them through my program. Thought you'd like to know.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

I have a home grown DNG file "developer" program that I try to keep up-to-date. I have made a couple of updates to it to support Project Indigo files (like WarpRectilinear2). I have noticed that in some instances the DefaultCropSize tag in an Indigo file is all zeros. That is, the numerator and denominator values in the two rational values are zero, leading to NaN values. I'm running Indigo on an iPhone 15 (not a Pro or Pro Max). The problem seems confined to the front camera and the back wide camera (not the ultra-wide camera and not the wide camera in 2X mode). I import the Indigo files directly from the phone into the latest version of Lightroom Classic, then run them through my program. Thought you'd like to know.

By @David31709443nyi8

Thank you for reporting this. We have confirmed the issue and will fix it as soon as possible.

David 101

Participating Frequently

I finf that images shot and edited in Pi end up with a magenta tint in the saved file. Is there a way to avoid this outcome?

Also, could the app clarify whether the editing in Pi is applied to to the dng, jpg or both?

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chrisd40442477

Participating Frequently

As I follow this thread, have noticed many experiencing color consistency issue. When exporting the Indigo raw using LR Moibile, I then export the DNG to my Mac. I color grade the DNG in CaptureOne, my editor of choice. I've found that the unadulterated Indigo raws then require me to very heavily color grade the raws back to what would be considered normal.

Using this method, which takes a s - - t load of time, there are zero profiles or settings in the raws to work with. Very tedious but to me, it almost feels like a piece of art when I process the graded raw to a final image file. Just like the old days!

If I don't want or need t take the time, I just use the jpgs for down-and-dirty results. In this reply, I attached a very heavily graded pic of my home town. The original raw was very flat, and looked quite underexposed. Took me 30 minutes to grade, color correction +saturation, contrast and lots of selective masking. The final image file looks like something I could've captured on my Sony A7rV. Indigo is a fun camera app but to me, requires a lot of back-end color grading to make images look super.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

As I follow this thread, have noticed many experiencing color consistency issue. When exporting the Indigo raw using LR Moibile, I then export the DNG to my Mac. I color grade the DNG in CaptureOne, my editor of choice. I've found that the unadulterated Indigo raws then require me to very heavily color grade the raws back to what would be considered normal.

Using this method, which takes a s - - t load of time, there are zero profiles or settings in the raws to work with. Very tedious but to me, it almost feels like a piece of art when I process the graded raw to a final image file. Just like the old days!

If I don't want or need t take the time, I just use the jpgs for down-and-dirty results. In this reply, I attached a very heavily graded pic of my home town. The original raw was very flat, and looked quite underexposed. Took me 30 minutes to grade, color correction +saturation, contrast and lots of selective masking. The final image file looks like something I could've captured on my Sony A7rV. Indigo is a fun camera app but to me, requires a lot of back-end color grading to make images look super.

By @chrisd40442477

I am not sure I fully understand your workflow. In order for me to help, it would be good to know exactly:

How you are getting Indigo photos to Lightroom (and which version of Lightroom are you using)?
How are you exporting the image from Lightroom?

Since you are using CaptureOne for color grading, note that they most probably do not support the full DNG standard, which includes tone and color look up tables. Indigo uses both, and without them the image will indeed look flat. I am curious if you see a similar issue with DNGs opened in Lightroom, or if this is a problem when you workflow uses non-Adobe tools.

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julian98A2

Participant

Any news on Android development?

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Any news on Android development?

By @julian98A2

Android is on the team's roadmap, but further development on iOS is the current priority. We have a lot more computational photography to add and feature to build around them, focusing on a single platform is necessary for the time being.

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