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31

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Adobe Employee ,
May 23, 2025 May 23, 2025

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 thiProject 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: 

 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
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iOS: iPhone
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replies 699 Replies 699
Adobe Employee ,
Aug 25, 2025 Aug 25, 2025
quote

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.

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Explorer ,
Aug 24, 2025 Aug 24, 2025

@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...

 

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 25, 2025 Aug 25, 2025
quote

@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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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 25, 2025 Aug 25, 2025
quote
By @nhan_8084

Just to clarify - are you sure these aren't clouds in the scene?

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Explorer ,
Aug 25, 2025 Aug 25, 2025

@BorisTheBlade There was clouds yes, the post processed pic is what my eyes saw.

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade There was clouds yes, the post processed pic is what my eyes saw.


By @nhan_8084

OK, thanks. I tried using the two JPEGs you provided and cranking up the brightness in the sky to see what happens. To me they look the same... i.e., I am not sure I see any extra "blotchiness" in one vs the other. Are you able to help me here and point out what exactly are the blotchy artifacts you are seeing? Thank you.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@BorisTheBlade I think the blotchiness could be from the clouds but typical cloud formations as more curve outlines to them bc since it's in the actual raw, both processed and sooc will have it.  The halos in the tree lines are more of concerns for me, sorry for the confusion on what I am trying to point out.  

 

Next time, I will pay more attention to the clouds as well to see how it looks.

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Explorer ,
Aug 24, 2025 Aug 24, 2025

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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Explorer ,
Aug 01, 2025 Aug 01, 2025

I've just started using Indigo which I'll edit on LRC.

Does it record GPS coordinates? I can't find them.

I hope so; it's really important to know exactly where the shot was taken.

Thanks

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LEGEND ,
Aug 01, 2025 Aug 01, 2025

Perhaps some other forum (as this is not a question about Lightroo Classic) would be a better place for your question.

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 01, 2025 Aug 01, 2025

It does! You just need to ensure that the appropriate permissions are set.

IMG_3992.jpegIMG_3993.jpegIMG_3994.jpeg

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LEGEND ,
Aug 01, 2025 Aug 01, 2025

MODERATOR please move this to the appropriate forum

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@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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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

@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:

  1. without any modifications (we get 12MP quad bayer)
  2. with "remosaicing" (convert single frame 12MP quad bayer to 12MP bayer raw)
  3. 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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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

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?

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

If I understood the original question, Indigo's SuperRes zoom is already similar if not better than the native 2x sensor crop due to bad processing from Apple with heavy denoising and oversharpening right @BorisTheBlade ?  SuperRes operates on upscaling as well?  Also in theory Indigo team "could" achieve 48mp jpeg similar to the Topaz AI Upscaler algos but definitely not the raw 48mp right?

 

Sensor cropping is only good if it's properly processed by the oem, the raws will always be better native since it's true in sensor vs any upscale model since full sensor isn't exposed from Apple @power-power 

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

If I understood the original question, Indigo's SuperRes zoom is already similar if not better than the native 2x sensor crop due to bad processing from Apple with heavy denoising and oversharpening right @BorisTheBlade ?  SuperRes operates on upscaling as well?  Also in theory Indigo team "could" achieve 48mp jpeg similar to the Topaz AI Upscaler algos but definitely not the raw 48mp right?


By @nhan_8084

True "raw" 48MP would require a 48MP raw sensor. Anything else is some form of "processed raw". Nothing wrong with that, as all computational photography raws fall into that category, except that if the processed raw includes resolution increase then there is always potential for more artifacts than if the resolution is maintained (generally speaking; details would depend on the details of the processing algorithm). Apple also does computational photography of some kind to deliver a 12MP cropped ProRaw at 2x zoom, and how they do that we do not know. After they get the "processed raw" however there is definitely some difference in how much post-processing is done vs what Indigo does. Apple might as well update their processing algorithms in the next iOS version and improve on the 2x zoom quality, or they may want for a new SoC which has the updated processing baked into the ISP. Only Apple knows what the plan there is.

Regarding super-resolution used in Indigo, it relies on the lens not being diffraction limited (which wide camera isn't), such that when there is natural handshake, different details from the scene are captured by different frames and can be reconstructed back. So it is not the Topaz-style upsampling, which uses a single-image + pre-trained model to increase image resolution, often by hallucinating the missing detail. Indigo super-resolution may create wrong detail in the image, but that is by mistake (which we are trying to fix), not because the model itself has hallucination baked in.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@BorisTheBlade  Ah ok, so let say SR at 2x uses 9 frames, all 9 will be slightly different due to handshaking, merge and re-align?  Isn't this the same principle as the non super-res 1x and 5x?  Or is the 1x and 5x taking let say 9 frames, discarding any frames that's blurry, merge and re-align?

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade  Ah ok, so let say SR at 2x uses 9 frames, all 9 will be slightly different due to handshaking, merge and re-align?  Isn't this the same principle as the non super-res 1x and 5x?  Or is the 1x and 5x taking let say 9 frames, discarding any frames that's blurry, merge and re-align?


By @nhan_8084

This blog from Google from way back can explain a bit more how extra detail can be recovered in presence of handhake: https://research.google/blog/see-better-and-further-with-super-res-zoom-on-the-pixel-3/

Multi-frame super-resolution and align&merge use different approaches to handling individual frames and to merging them. Generally, we do avoid using blurry frames, as they have obvious detail losses. But the impact of discarding blurred frames is different for super-resolution than it is for aligning&merging.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@BorisTheBlade Yes, I am aware of RAISR, awesome tech from Marc and team!  I know Indigo is still troubleshooting the overheat issues from SR but is it possible to have SR starting at 1.1x and 5.1x to behave similar to ISZ crops?  

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Explorer ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025

@BorisTheBlade Seems like this comment got burried, could you answer this regarding super res?

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade Yes, I am aware of RAISR, awesome tech from Marc and team!  I know Indigo is still troubleshooting the overheat issues from SR but is it possible to have SR starting at 1.1x and 5.1x to behave similar to ISZ crops?  


By @nhan_8084

I am not sure what ISZ crops means. In principle it is possible to run our SR on any capture, but there would need to me some changes made to the underlying ML model. Our priority is performance and stability, so expanding the zoom range where SR is active will be secondary for the time being.

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Explorer ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025

@BorisTheBlade ISZ is In-sensor zoom, using the full resolution sensor and center cropping in.  Since apple has locked the full resolution, it would be great if Indigo can do 2.1-4.9x super res, then 5.1-9.9x but since you mention performance and stability maybe it is too hard to do?  

I rather the team just keep the 2x and 10x and work on motion capturing during those so there won't be artifacts at the 10x as I showed when subject in motion.

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

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?


By @powerful_Elixir5E29

The true answer is that I don't really know. We'd need to develop a new super-res algorithm which uses the quad bayer input and then see what we get. AFAIK, it may as well be dependent on how quad bayer is implemented wrt physical microlenses and other sensor detail.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@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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