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 more testing using 1.0.2 seems better indoor but still has that extra denoising applied.  The bigger issue I am concern is that the hdr tonemap is still not showing on third party app like if using photo compare, please make it like google camera and stock apple photos where it will display sdr for non hdr apps!  See attached.  Using gphotos it shows hdr tonemap fine but hdr gone if using photocompare app!

[BorisTheBlade]

Indigo uses the ISO standard (https://www.iso.org/standard/86775.html) for storing gain maps in JPEGs which support SDR and HDR rendering. It is up to other tools in the wider photography ecosystem to implement full support for ISO gain maps.

[Raincouver]

Hi Indigo Team,

Thanks for your ongoing work on Project Indigo — the app has great potential and I’m excited to see where it goes.

I wanted to report an issue I’ve recently encountered. About half of the photos I take using the Indigo app end up with a black bar at the bottom of the image. It appears post-capture and seems like a rendering or processing glitch.

Details:

• Device: iPhone 15 Pro Max

• OS: iOS 26 Beta

• Indigo App version: Latest version

• Frequency: Roughly 50% of shots

Please let me know if this is a known issue or if there’s a workaround. Please find the sample images below. Appreciate your attention to this!

[lucasw73817227]

I posted about this a few days ago. I notice it only happening for photos taken with the main 1x camera. It seems to be a black bar added to the pictures so I made a shortcut to remove the bars. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/7f557a743f024e679919fc0f6ff848a8

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for trying Project Indigo. I can see that you are running iOS 26 Beta. This is not a production-ready iOS version and as such may have bugs. We will be working with Apple to iron out such issues prior to the release of iOS 26 in the fall.

[BorisTheBlade]

Following up on this issue - the black bar problem should have been resolved in iOS 26 Beta 3. Please give it a try and let us know if you see the problem still. Thank you for helping improve Project Indigo camera!

[Gide�o]

Dear Adobe Project Indigo Team, I'm incredibly impressed with the work you're doing on Project Indigo. The concept is truly exciting, and I'm eager to see its full potential unfold. Congratulations on what appears to be a groundbreaking initiative!

As a Samsung Android user, I'm particularly interested in the development of the Project Indigo app for the Android platform. Could you share some insights into its progress on Android, specifically concerning Samsung devices?

One key area of curiosity for me is how you plan to navigate the limitations often imposed by Samsung regarding direct camera hardware access. This has historically been a challenge for developers. Do you have a strategy in place to circumvent these restrictions to ensure Project Indigo can fully leverage camera capabilities on Samsung phones?

Thank you for your time and for creating such innovative tools. 😉

[arun_6823]

Hi Team, this is remarkable and I can already see a lot of difference- when is this coming to android with the likes of Galaxy S25 Ultra, Pixel Series, Vivo X200U any thoughts?

[ERORR4K25945328g6pj]

Hello Adobe team, could you let us know if there are any intentions to open-source?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for your interest in Project Indigo. We do not have intentions to open-source Indigo code at this time. It is an experimental app for our team to evaluate camera-related technologies and collect feedback from the wider community of photographers and photography enthusiasts. 

[Einar-Adobe-Iceland]

I have the Indigo app on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. When when trying to slide to the left, I can't reach the wheel button dor further pref settings. I can see it, bud the bar slides a little back making it impossible for me to click the settings wheel.

[michaela38849736]

Go to iPhone settings/display and brightness/display zoom and make sure it's set to "default". 
thr "larger text" settings causes this problem on my 15 pro max. 

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello Einar and Michaela - thank you for this discussion. Another possible reason may be if you have the 'Button Shapes' toggle enabled in the device settings under Accessibility -> Display & Text Size.

[Brandon Singer]

Great app! A cool feature would be the abilty to take a series of photos to make a 360 HDRI to be used with other Adobe apps.

[andrea-hongkong]

When will it be available at the App Store in Hong Kong?

[BorisTheBlade]

When will it be available at the App Store in Hong Kong?

By @andrea-hongkong

Hi Andrea - Indigo is available in the Hong Kong App Store as of yesterday. Try it out and let us know what you think.

[João23738580ajt9]

Good morning,

I'm using Indigo with an iPhone 14 pro, and the latest update disabled Super Resolution. I want to activate it again, but I can't find the settings section. Can someone help me?

[Ed5E57]

They disabled another of the features due to overheating including SR.

Get Outlook for iOS<>

[João23738580ajt9]

In the Indigo app page, they sy it's possible to activate SR again in these older models: - Disabled super-resolution by default on iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max, and iPhone 15/15+ devices. It can be re-enabled in the Settings menu, but may warm up your phone

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/project-indigo/id6742591546

[Ed5E57]

What settings menu? I don’t see one in either settings/indigo or in the app itself

Get Outlook for iOS<>

[João23738580ajt9]

Exactly, I can't see it too...

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you both for trying Indigo and for reporting your issues with accessing the app settings. Do you by any chance have 'Button Shapes' toggle enabled in the device settings under Accessibility -> Display & Text Size? Alternatively, do you have Display Zoom set to 'Large' in device settings under Display & Brightness?

[xavier_4156]

I have some questions and suggestions for this amazing app which seems to have unlimited potential.

FIRST, I will start with the things you guys are doing perfectly, the SUPERRESOLUTION zoom is absolutely incredible and works amazingly. I love the MUCH better processing you do on the 5xens on my 15 pro max. It is just miles above the normal camera app processing for that camera. That said I do have complaints.

Firstly the processing for the main lens seems worse then the processing for the 5x lens, it is less saturated and less pleasing in general and overexposes or under exposes way to often. I would honestly just copy and paste the processing for the other lens into the main one. Second complaint, this app DOES NOT use 24mp as the default even though with my device (15pm) it is the default, is this on the roadmap to add 24mp / 48mp support? Last complaint is that night mode seems to be broken as images come out either completely black or with one red highlight in the middle. Very odd but I'm sure it will be fixed in time.

In total, THANK YOU SO MUCH for creating the best iPhone camera app and letting us actually use the full potential of the amazing cameras in our pockets. Final question, will this stay free? What is the plan for updates to this app and will this functionality always stay free or will it go behind a subscription (please don't ☹️).

Also I have attached a photo of my father right out of the camera app, this has no external editing, it's amazing what the processing on the 5x lens looks like just straight out of the app. Unfortunately as mentioned above, the photo processing on the other lens's are not up to the same standard, I hope this is improved!

Final thank you 🙂

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello Xavier - thank you for trying Indigo and for providing your detailed thoughts and critique. To address some of your complaints:

• On comparing processing between 1x lens and 5x lens, are you able to share some examples where 5x is clearly better than the 1x in the same environment? 
• On image resolution, Indigo unfortunately only gets access to 12MP raw images. We can get 48MP images with Apple's ProRaw, but that would prevent us from doing our computational photography, or by applying our super-resolution to increase the output resolution, but for that we need to optimize the code more to prevent any additional overheating.
• For the Night mode captures which look black, can you share what kind of settings are you using? Is this point-and-shoot Night mode capture, or do you have Pro controls enabled? If so, which Pro controls are on/off? Do you have an example DNG you can share with us so we can inspect?

Thank you for the help!

[nhan_8084]

Was testing 5x indoors and noticed something strange, all shots shown below are taken with normal mode and not night modes.  One shot of the same scene, as you see from a crop of it(8989) to show that processing did not apply at all, very grainy and noisy, sorta like luma denoising is completely turn off (which is a good thing to have control of like this shot at times), then the same scene shot has almost perfect granular tuning.  This tuning is the type of tuning that I want the team at Project Indigo to do for all lenses at all conditions to be honest(670).  Then there's the shot with processing applied too much(357).  I understand that image (357) has a much lesser iso while the others iso at 1000, but tuning can be adjust static and not iso triggered because it might apply overdenoising as seen, turning it into oil painting!  @BorisTheBlade