P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Sometimes it's not always convenient to edit in Lightroom after shooting in Indigo, and I would use the native iPhone (16 Pro Max, iOS 18.6.2) Photos app for quick changes, say cropping. I noticed that when I edit a JPEG+RAW file in Photos that a slight magenta/purple tint color shift occurs globally upon save, even if the only change is cropping. On revert, the color cast is removed.

Is there away to avoid this other than following the Lightroom workflow? Thank you.

See example:  https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hvnl8cltl4rc97bjvgobn/Indigo-color-cast-on-change-in-photos-app.mov?rlkey=39ggda1cqw4w7jdaedu1ryf9v&st=44owji9n&dl=0

By @StevenErat

This is a known issue in iOS 18. Apple fixed this problem in iOS 26, and we are waiting for more users to test it to verify that it is indeed completely resolved. Note that the Apple Photos app edits the JPEG version of the image, not the DNG, whereas when you open the image in Lightroom the DNG will be edited.

Oh and just one last question, with the iPhone 17 Pro, would you be able to almost simulate an automatic variable ND filter? If so, that could be a big deal for video!

By @WillSnaps

Can you share what you envision this "automatic variable ND filter" would do when recording video? What kind of use-cases would it apply to, and what outputs do you wish to generate with it?

Hi,

 

Could you please include the option to enable the flash feature? 

By @giofurlanetto

We will investigate adding flash to the pictures, though with computational photography that gets a bit harder to do: when capturing up to 32 frames, the LED flash on the back of the mobile device can either be run in full power mode for a very short time, or it can be run in low power (torch) mode for longer. In the former case, only a few of the 32 frames will have been exposed with the flash, making aligning and merging the image harder. For the latter case, the flash will be probably too weak to be helpful in many scenarios. If you have the time and are willing to share, I'd be curious to learn from you what are the situations in which you would prefer to have the flash capture option. Thanks.

I really like the photos Indigo is capturing. Please consider adding support for using the Apple Watch for remote shutter trigger. I'm eager to experiment with Indigo's Night Mode and long exposures. Being able to do that without touching the phone would be swell! Many thanks 

By @NJSS

Thank you for reaching out - this is indeed on our roadmap to do. For the time being you can set up a timed capture in Indigo (3, 5, or 10s), which will make sure the device is perfectly stable before the Long Exposure capture starts.

is there a possibility to do lossless dng compression like on the pixels gcam? I find it very space hogging after processing dng to jpeg, they all get around 20mb range for a jpeg! I was hoping for half of that since it's only 12mp raws like in google camera dng to jpeg. I think compression for jpeg is 95% and raw was lossless compression in google camera.

 

For the pixel, the raw on 12mp is about 14-18mb, importing to lightroom mobile, killing all sharp and denoise and exporting to jpeg is about 6mb vs the usually 15-20mb I normally see from Indigo in all lighting conditions.

By @nhan_8084

Indigo already uses lossless DNG compression and JPEG output at 95% quality setting. I am not sure what workflow you are talking about here: are you importing a DNG into Lightroom, editing, then exporting as JPEG and ending up with a large file?

Gah, I meant to say the 16 Pro doesn't have ProRes RAW. ProRes RAW is new for the 17 Pro

@BorisTheBlade What happened with the app updates? You said it is coming in the upcoming weeks? Also i hope app performance is greatly improved and heat since this update took almost 3 months.

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

A new build is imminent. Having said that, there are a few things to be aware of here:

1. Indigo is experimental, and there is no commitment (yet) from Adobe on productizing it. So all effort that goes in it is due to a passionate, but rather small team working on it.
2. As menioned above, we are a small team. Depending on what an app does one doesn't necessarily need a big team, but Indigo is complex so things take time.
3. Did I mention that Indigo is complex? Indeed, since we own the full image capture and processing pipeline, making changes is oftentimes a lot more involved than if we were to "just" reuse Apple's capture pipeline. For many 3rd party camera apps adding certain features is really just a bit of UI/UX work. For us it may require that plus a decent amount of messing about with the core capture and processing functionality.
4. Furthermore, building on the 'experimental' label from above, as we are building Indigo, we often find that the way we did some things initially is suboptimal and may make things slower for the user, or it may make building extensions harder. So we are changing quite a few things under-the-hood which you may not notice any gains from, but which will allow us to do things better or faster later.

The team really appreciates the support we are getting from the community, especially here on the forum. We are accutely aware that Indigo has some sore spots that need fixing or improving, and the main one are stability and performance. These will be coming out to our users over time, and the next update already includes some such improvements - for example, I can tease that we managed to improve the super-resolution speed without impacting image quality. Stay tuned for more.

I love the images from the app, they're amazing. I notice that ewhen i view the images on iphone there is a slight pause then it seems like the lights turn on. What's happening?  Can i print the lights on image?

By @carromdc

Hello - I am not sure I understand what you are experiencing with the lights turning on. Would you mind explaining a bit more?

I’m using a Japanese-model iPhone and a shutter / notification sound is required when taking photos in Japan (or when the device is in Airplane Mode). However, in Project Indigo the shutter sound plays continuously—even when I’m not pressing the shutter button. This constant sound makes it very hard to take photos in public without disturbing others.

By @liyuu_8951

Thank you for reaching out. This is a known issue, due to the fact that Indigo's viewfinder always streams raw frames which are used both for our custom auto-exposure algorithm and for our Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL) functionality. We are working with Apple on trying to enable shutter sound disabling world wide. Please stay tuned.

I have been using Indigo from the start and it became my main camera app (mapped it to camera button)

the main differentiator from stock camera app is color rendition wchi feels much more natural, film-like, less flat and processed. The image has much more plasticity!

Attached few recent pictures (all are straight unprocessed jpegs)

p.s. still waiting for pure astophotography mode

By @karen_5438

Thank you for sharing your images - these all look wonderful! Regarding improvements to long exposure functionality, including the astrophotography mode, these are in progress. It will take a few cycles for us to progressively add more, as astrophotography requires custom processing which differs from regular captures. Stay tuned!