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: 

[BorisTheBlade]

Very nice - thank you for sharing. One more question: is your processing pipeline SDR or are you dabbling in HDR as well?

[Eli Johanson]

Dubai photos shot in basic RAW SDR. Here are the settings. Used Indigo with default HDR settings. The forest shot isn't artistic - just wanted to show my wife how our woods look after rain

[BorisTheBlade]

Thank you for sharing your settings screenshot. This looks like a single-frame DNG, with little post-processing. It can work nicely in bright daylight conditions, especially when the dynamic range of the scene is limited. But in low-light or in higher dynamic range scenes it may struggle.

For the record, you can get a similar result with Indigo: if you open Pro Controls in Night mode, the last Pro Control allows you to set the number of frames to a low number, or even to a single frame. Note however that this can interfere with features like super-resolution zoom, and will likely reduce the overall image quality.

[Eli Johanson]

Fresh shots captured on Indigo and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Which look do you prefer?

[mopperle]

TBH, totally different photos at totally different locations with totally different light situations. So what answer do you expect? Post the same photo with different looks and you will get an answer.

[nhan_8084]

@Eli Johanson I just downloaded this app to try.  I do not see a dng output eventhough raw is selected and I dont have the grip.  I only see heic.

[mopperle]

Currently there is no separate dng. You will see it only in LR Mobile. But they are working on a solution.

[Moonboots22]

When do you anticipate a second release that may address the overheating issue? Fixing that alone would make this a candidate as the preferred overall camera app on iPhone. I have a 16 Pro on the latest stable update but do get overheating issues with this.

I've been most impressed with the superzoom, and baked in reflection removal/AI denoise options. This shows tons of promise!

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for reaching out. We are happy you are enjoying Indigo, and are working hard to help alleviate the overheating issues. A new version with improvements on that front is coming shortly. 

[DingMac]

Brill new camera app, I find my iPhone Pro Max 15 gets really, really hot and unstable. A heatsink mod needed? LOL. ANYWAY... my joint RAW+Jpeg / Jpeg+RAW shots end up in Photos on my iMac and I cannot figure out getting the RAW file into Lightroom Classic. Please, how is this done? Someone please help! The export-unchanged original- save in folder X  gets me a jpeg or a tiff file but I cannot get a RAW file to play with?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for your feedback. To get raw files to Lightroom Classic, Greg Benz has nicely listed options for how to get the files onto your machine (towards the bottom of the page): https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-reviews/project-indigo-the-best-camera-app-for-smart-pho...

We will work on enabling DNG-only capture in a future update which will help mitigate this issue.

[Teragion]

Thank you so much for developing this amazing app! After some simple tests, I found that the images captured by project indigo has so much finer detail and dynamic range than most other camera apps, making me eager to take only my phone instead of my cameras for a photo walk. However, there is a big obstacle for me.

As I own only an iPhone sold in Japan and living in Japan, it produces a loud shutter sound when photo is taken as per legal regulations (with privacy concerns). However, this appears disastrous for apps like Project Indigo as it capture a constant stream of images as soon as it is launched, render it unusable in any public settings even if I am not attempting to take any image violating others’ privacy. (As the noise is unbearable)

My suggestion is that, as it essentially captures a stream of images and selectively save frames, it is analogous to the function of capturing a video and record some interesting frames while recording using the camera button aside to the record button in the Apple’s stock camera app. Might there be a way to also treat project indigo’s image stream as a video capture thus only play sound when recording starts and ends?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and for your message. We appreciate the inconvenience of trying to use the app while the shutter sound is continuously playing. We are looking into solutions for this together with Apple and will share an update as soon as we can.

Regarding your question about video, technically it is possible to use a short video stream instead of raw frames. However, that is likely to reduce the resulting image quality. We are hoping that we can resolve the shutter sound issue with Apple such that our customers in Japan can start using Indigo to its fullest.

[peterpreager@rogers.com]

I am not sure about the consistency of sharing an image with LR. While taking a picture of the same subject maybe 5 minutes apart and, in both cases, with dng and jpg selected, one image relects the dng file and the Indigo Profile and the associated file size (14 m in my case), the second image only reflects the jpg file and no Indigo profile.

Am I doing something wrong?

[BorisTheBlade]

Peter - thank you for trying Indigo, and for sharing your feedback. I am not sure I understand what your use case is and what you are trying to do/achieve. May I ask you to explain your use case again? Thank you.

[peterpreager@rogers.com]

I also found that when you upload to LR, if indeed it is a dng file and the Indigo profile is there, when you select another profile, say adaptive color, and then want to swith back to the Indigo profile it is not there.

[BorisTheBlade]

Hi Peter - thank you for reporting this. We are aware of the problem and will be working with Lightroom on fixing it.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade I and others have probably mentioned this before but could we get a raw dng file(not only separated from the jpeg embedded), but also have the BARE MINIMAL if not no noise reduction (both luma and chroma), and no sharpening of any sorts added?  It is fine to have stacked raw like google camera for better natural noise reduction, but Indigo is just so great of an app to apply any post processing to the raws!  I really really hope the team prioritizes this for the upcoming update as I can't see it being a challenge at all to not apply processing to it.

[photopoeth]

Some major UI issues with a non MAX screen (here iPhone 14 Pro):

First, the button for front/back cam covers the button for the highest zoom level.

Secondly, there is too little space at the top for the middle display. As you can see on the first screenshot: as long as I scroll to the second "page" and haven't let go yet, the self-timer button is visible. As soon as I let go (second screenshot), the timer button is no longer visible.

In my opinion, both problems can be easily solved:

1. There would still be space to the left of the zoom buttons so that they could all slide to the left.

2. The button at the top left (image format) would not need to be nearly as large. It takes up a ton of screen real estate and guess how often I did use it? Answer: never. Maybe it's just me, but having only the option to choose between two options probably isn't used that often by the majority of users. It's different in the Standard Cam where you can choose beween JPG, HEIF, RAW-12 and RAW-max. So why is it there at such a prominent spot eating up that much real estate?
The button at the top right is unnecessary because you can already set it at the bottom. I could do without it and, on the contrary, find it confusing because there are two options for switching.

Great approach for a camera app - thanks for that! If you can get the overheating problems under control, it would really be a great choice as a standard camera. Unfortunately, I only use it very selectively at the moment. More often in night mode, where the overheating has not yet occurred, but in photo mode I think twice before starting the app.

Here are the screenshots I've mentioned:

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for reporting these issues. I believe you have some Accessibility features turned on, specifically Display & Text Size -> Button Shapes. If you disable that, does the UI look and feel improve? It also looks like you have larger text and or Display size enabled. Project Indigo currently doesn't react well to various combinations of Accessibility features being turned on. We will be working on these in future updates, but for the time being turning as many off is the best way to get Indigo to look and feel as intended.

[Ed5E57]

That doesn’t fix anything on my iPhone 14 Pro

[BorisTheBlade]

That doesn’t fix anything on my iPhone 14 Pro
By @Ed5E57

Hello - can you help me by clarifying what issues you are refering to with Indigo on iPhone 14 Pro?

[photopoeth]

Hi Boris. I'm sorry, but I had overlooked your reply. I had indeed changed some settings regarding “Button Shape” and “Text Size”. If I reset it, it will be better, but not perfect yet. Thank you!

My comments regarding the wasted screen real estate are still valid.

(1) I still think the button for switching between JPEG <-> DNG + JPEG should not be constantly visible (and if it is necessary in your eyes, it should be smaller).
(2) Also, the double option to switch between Photo and Night takes up an unnecessary amount of screen real estate.

[BorisTheBlade]

Hi Boris. I'm sorry, but I had overlooked your reply. I had indeed changed some settings regarding “Button Shape” and “Text Size”. If I reset it, it will be better, but not perfect yet. Thank you!

My comments regarding the wasted screen real estate are still valid.

(1) I still think the button for switching between JPEG <-> DNG + JPEG should not be constantly visible (and if it is necessary in your eyes, it should be smaller).
(2) Also, the double option to switch between Photo and Night takes up an unnecessary amount of screen real estate.

By @photopoeth

OK, great - glad to see we are narrowing down where the issue may be. For the remaining icon drawing issues, those should go away if you go to Settings -> Display & Brightness -> Display Zoom and make that 'Default' instead of 'Larger Text'. We will keep optimizing the UI, as well as adding support for Accessibility features, so the app always looks as nice and optimal as possible.

[photopoeth]

Thanks a lot @BorisTheBlade I've changed the setting to 'Default', now everything look good although I can hardly read it. 😉 So hopefully it will get fixed soon with deviating settings and hopefully I'll hear about it.