P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

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 
 
Posted by: 

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade I can confirm that Indigo does always under expose vs stock camera, however that isn't always good for jpeg since it isn't true to scene.  For iPhone 17 series, the exposure and hdr apple has now is almost perfect to the human eyes(aside from led neon signs, and lightbulbs) in pretty much all scenes tested.  Can Indigo do ETTR?  Raw is fine as is but I noticed that unless you hit reset to all in lightroom mobile, the saturation/vibrance levels are quite high.  The Indigo jpeg also have the same high levels of saturation vs stock which is very accurate in terms of saturation/vibrance as well.

[Eruannon88]

I like the way Indigo manages the highlights and I wonder if you ever considered implementing different metering systems (if that's even possible on iPhone), I'd really like to have a "Highlight-Weighted" one, for example (like on Sony or Ricoh's cameras). And keep up the good work. Thank you for this app!

[t.linn]

I strongly support your approach of protecting the highlights!

[toni_0822]

Hellooo, just wanted to very kindly ask for a little update about Android compatibility. And if the compatibility with older devices will depend mainly on the android version, the ram, the processing power, camera hardware/cpu or just all of it.

Thanks very much in advance 🙂

[toni_0822]

*With the first question I mean the general android port and the second question is more about a very rough estimation which specific device tiers and generations may be compatible. If even old android devices can be supported as long as they have a big ram to compensate missing performance, for example.

[johndoc1]

I post here because I didn't see an Indigo community.  If there is a better community, please transfer this post.

I have an iOS 17pro phone and just had Project Indigo (Version 10.5) appear after not being available initially.  I set the photo format to DNG. I immediately tried a set of photos (0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x) of the same scene to check operation.  None of the photos were 48mp!  Some were as low as 3mp.  Also, the images were gray-like.  I immediately switched back to the Apple camera, shot the same scene and got 48mp for 0.5, 1.0, 4.0 and 12mp for 2 and 8x.  I then tried DNG+JPG.  Still no 48mp (1x photo).  Inside Project Indigo, I had two versions of the photo, one labeled JPG and one labeled DNG+JPG.  In my camera roll (iPhone Photos), only the JPG appeared.

A few questions:

1. How do I set Project Indigo to use the 48mp cameras
2. Why do the DNGs look gray (unprocessed?)?
3.  Why don't I see a DNG file in my camera roll?

Appreciate any help on the 17Pro.

John D

[toni_0822]

Hey, one Page before the 48mp topic was already mentioned. Just gonna repost what the dev told the other user:

"Indigo does not support more than 12MP capture. ... We are looking into adding some form of 48MP support for Indigo, but that is not available yet."

About the rest I have no idea, sorry😅

But maybe you will figure out more if you red a few of the past pages, definitely helpful information there of some kind.

Have a great day🙂👋🏼

[johndoc1]

Thanks for the reply.  Bummer.  

[Jeff Donald]

Just to expand on the limitations, Apple does not give access to a 48 Megapixel processing pipeline unless Apple ProRAW is selected. ProRAW is a highly processed image using HDR, multiple frames and computational processing (photography). A major part of PI is avoiding the pitfalls of over processed HDR and computational processing. This means 12 megapixel dng files. 

[johndoc1]

Thanks for the explanation.  I understand, just wish I could get the best of both worlds.  Sounds like a typical Apple 'walled garden' approach.

[Sweet Light]

My understanding is that PI also uses computational photography, combining multiple frames. PI is doing it differently, resulting in higher quality color reproduction throughout the tone scale.

[WangZheng]

Thanks so much for the app, the result it produces remind some of my favorite phone photography taken on nexus. I wish I could use the project indigo as my main camera app but the only problem stopping me doing so right now is that the app opens significantly slower than native camera app. It not only has a logo screen for half second, but a long lag for camera to be active (blackout at the beginning of entering the interface. the native camera app does that too but with a much shorter duration) I do a lot street photography, and this makes the flow sometimes awkward. Not to say taking photo of my cats, right now I only have the confidence to use indigo when they are sleeping.

[BorisTheBlade]

Thanks so much for the app, the result it produces remind some of my favorite phone photography taken on nexus. I wish I could use the project indigo as my main camera app but the only problem stopping me doing so right now is that the app opens significantly slower than native camera app. It not only has a logo screen for half second, but a long lag for camera to be active (blackout at the beginning of entering the interface. the native camera app does that too but with a much shorter duration) I do a lot street photography, and this makes the flow sometimes awkward. Not to say taking photo of my cats, right now I only have the confidence to use indigo when they are sleeping.

By @WangZheng

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Indigo. Indeed, the native camera app will load the fastest. For Indigo we need to prepare a few things before the camera can be used, and they take some time. We will keep optimizing the startup sequence to squeeze any performance we can out of it. For reference, not all ways to start the app operate equally fast: in my personal experience, starting the app from the Lock/Home screen or with the Action button are the fastest methods, while using the Camera app or the Control center shortcut are slower. 

[nhan_8084]

Took this pic on my iPhone 17 pro max using the latest Indigo version, the jpeg white balance is not accurate.  It did proper white balance to white but it isn't scene accurate as it nuked the 4000K softwhite yellowish hue cast.   I have attached the auto jpeg, raw, and correct post processed jpg.

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s2g2ju1x70d0nrtmnmqyu/Photo-Nov-01-2025-9-26-14-AM.dng?rlkey=osywx60x...

[BorisTheBlade]

Took this pic on my iPhone 17 pro max using the latest Indigo version, the jpeg white balance is not accurate.  It did proper white balance to white but it isn't scene accurate as it nuked the 4000K softwhite yellowish hue cast.   I have attached the auto jpeg, raw, and correct post processed jpg.

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s2g2ju1x70d0nrtmnmqyu/Photo-Nov-01-2025-9-26-14-AM.dng?rlkey=osywx60x...

By @nhan_8084

Thank you for sharing these - I will pass them to the team to review.

[BorisTheBlade]

Took this pic on my iPhone 17 pro max using the latest Indigo version, the jpeg white balance is not accurate.  It did proper white balance to white but it isn't scene accurate as it nuked the 4000K softwhite yellowish hue cast.   I have attached the auto jpeg, raw, and correct post processed jpg.

By @nhan_8084

Just to clarify - is 4000K the correct color temp, which got nuked by post-processing?

[nhan_8084]

Yes, that is what the grow light's manufacturer stated.  The 5000K color is more white looking, which seems to be what Indigo was leaning towards.

[BorisTheBlade]

OK, thanks... just to make sure there is no confusion:

• Did you do any manual WB adjustment in Indigo using Pro Controls, or was it all Auto?
• 4000K is the correct color temperature for the light source?
• When you manually edited the color temperature, you made it larger or smaller?
• At 5000K the scene looks more white overall (even if that is an incorrect WB temp)?

[nhan_8084]

If I remember correctly this shot was done using manual focus only while in Pro Mode bc I had a hard time getting it to auto focus in auto mode.  Nothing else was adjusted while in Pro Mode.  The 4000K is the labeled light source for my plant's grow light.  When I edited in LRM, I made it warmer a bit to represent the color I see with my eyes so in LRM I would slide the temp slider to the right to make it warmer.  I know that the lower Kelvin number the warmer color but in LRM the lower the Kelvin number the cooler.  Confusing as it is, when I mentioned 5000K being white, I meant the actual color in real life base on lightbulb colors and not the LRM setting.

[BorisTheBlade]

Thanks for the clarification. It may be that we cannot do much to correct a scene like this, especially if the mix of illumination and objects in the scene is "non-standard". We recommend using Pro Controls to set the white balance manually to a prefered value, and we will look into adding AWB options in the Auto mode of the app to be able to make some modifications without needing Pro controls.

[nhan_8084]

Also forgot to add, it seems like max zoom is now only 20x vs 25x before to match native cam on iPhone 15 pro max.  Can the team make it have zoom up to 40x to match apple's native zoom?  Of course with less denoising and mush once the team update the AI algos.

[BorisTheBlade]

Also forgot to add, it seems like max zoom is now only 20x vs 25x before to match native cam on iPhone 15 pro max.  Can the team make it have zoom up to 40x to match apple's native zoom?  Of course with less denoising and mush once the team update the AI algos.

By @nhan_8084

Since we only get a 12MP image resolution in bayer raw, if we were to zoom to 40x we'd need to employ 10x digital zoom, which would leave only 0.12MP of input size to work with. This is not enough to create a meaningful 12MP result photo without using hallucination (i.e., Generative AI). Therefore we are limiting the digital zoom to 5x.

[nhan_8084]

My guess is apple's 40x isn't quite generative AI, but them actually using a frame of the 48mp along with the digital zoom of the 12mp bayered version?  I couldn't figure out if they used the entire ISZ zoom because I couldn't not see a change in banding position in viewfinder when pointing to an OLED screen.  Can you verify on your end?

[BorisTheBlade]

My guess is apple's 40x isn't quite generative AI, but them actually using a frame of the 48mp along with the digital zoom of the 12mp bayered version?  I couldn't figure out if they used the entire ISZ zoom because I couldn't not see a change in banding position in viewfinder when pointing to an OLED screen.  Can you verify on your end?

By @nhan_8084

We do not know how they are doing it - all we know is that they have 4x the pixels at 2x zoom (12MP vs 3MP we get), so them having 10x digital zoom vs our 5x digital zoom is, pixel-for-pixel, the same. Not much we can do to beat physics here...

[nhan_8084]

Would it be possible for Indigo to still do 10x digital since the sensor size is quite large vs the previous gen, then upscales it back to 12MP?  I do not know how hard this is to achieve, but Topaz upscaling does quite amazing for things like that nature.