P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Report · 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 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:

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hi! Is this normal in night photography? If it's not is there a work around? It's my first time using the app to take photos at night time

By @deejayceejay_1426

Hello - thank you for trying Indigo and reporting your experience. I have a few questions regarding the problem you experienced:

Did you capture the scene in Night mode or Photo mode?
Did you use Indigo in auto mode, or did you set some parameters manually with Pro controls?
Was the camera mostly static (handheld or tripod), or was it moving a bit?

If you are able to share DNGs with us that would help a great deal. Direct DNG sharing is unfortunately not working at the moment, but you could share via DropBox, Google Drive or similar.

Thank you for triaging this issue with us!

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Those green dots are typical flare exhibit of hdr and lens flare. Apple and most oem has the ability to remove them but not all the time. Sometimes you will see street light reflection inversed as flares.

Report · Jul 10, 2025

Hi! Is this normal in night photography? If it's not is there a work around? It's my first time using the app to take photos at night time

By @deejayceejay_1426

I forgot one more question - can you share which device and which lens did you use?

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hello, first of all, excellent project, really promising. I'd like to know if you plan to add some kind of "action" mode, because I notice that sometimes the photos I take of my animals come out blurry if they move. Again, thank you very much for the promising project!

Report · Jul 09, 2025

@Vitor_Pivetta3316 wrote:

Hello, first of all, excellent project, really promising. I'd like to know if you plan to add some kind of "action" mode, because I notice that sometimes the photos I take of my animals come out blurry if they move. Again, thank you very much for the promising project!

Hello Vitor - thank you for your interest in Indigo and your feedback. We will look into ways to add ability in Indigo to capture more use-cases, such as fast action. In the mean-time, what you can try is to use Pro controls by:

Reducing the shutter speed, while keeping the ISO automatic.
Reducing the number of frames captured (Night mode-only) to see if that makes it better for your needs. If you are capturing in very bright enviroment, you can make the number of frames all the way down to 1.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

@BorisTheBlade the 1x shot against the sun seems to have edge alisasing of some sort, it's razor edge and lines. One crop view is as is when imported to lightroom and the other is with adjustments. I am not sure if this is caused by missed focus, missalignment, or aliasing as I mentioned.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

@BorisTheBlade the 1x shot against the sun seems to have edge alisasing of some sort, it's razor edge and lines. One crop view is as is when imported to lightroom and the other is with adjustments. I am not sure if this is caused by missed focus, missalignment, or aliasing as I mentioned.

By @nhan_8084

Hello - thank you for reporting this. We have some suspicions what this may be, but would need a DNG to confirm. Are you able to share it (via DropBox, Google Drive, or similar)? Thank you for continuing to use Indigo and providing feedback!

Report · Jul 09, 2025

I can if I have the dng via pc. Ill try to get it somehow!

Report · Jul 16, 2025

Also, sorry for the late reply here. I decide to follow what someone here suggested and export the dng via lightroom mobile versus using the pc! Hopefully this works as original dng!

Report · Jul 22, 2025

Omg sorry I didn't check, it didn't upload the .dng so I will try again! @BorisTheBlade it kept giving me this error!

Report · Jul 10, 2025

@BorisTheBlade the 1x shot against the sun seems to have edge alisasing of some sort, it's razor edge and lines. One crop view is as is when imported to lightroom and the other is with adjustments. I am not sure if this is caused by missed focus, missalignment, or aliasing as I mentioned.

By @nhan_8084

The is chromatic aberration, and is common when you have backlit edges - showing up as purple or green edges. This is normally seen in backlit and especially wider angle SLR photography, and is easily removed in Lightroom's lens correction panel. It's caused by the light diffraction through the lens itself:

What is fringing, how to avoid and how to fix it » That Tog Spot

Report · Jul 10, 2025

Hi Michael, the purple can be a lot of things, aberration is one if it but it's not the edge or corner of the image. You can have this issue from over chroma denoising as well. But I was speaking of the lines and razor edges like aliasing issue of merge alignments, or some focus issue leading to incorrect merge? I am not too advanced indepth of cam debugging, I just have what I know from tuning gcam.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Enjoying indigo. I think it's an upgrade from other iPhone camera apps.

My issue is, I don't use Lightroom, dropped it about a decade ago. I am a heavy user of capture one. Can I take advantage of all of current and future features for this fantastic iOS camera app without using Lightroom?

Even if indigo required me to start using Lightroom I would not under any circumstances. Too heavily invested in the capture one environment.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hi Chris - thank you for your message. The DNG produced by Indigo is fully compliant with the public DNG spec, so in theory any image editor could support it 100% and you wouldn't need Lightroom for that. In practice though, most editors provide only a partial support for the spec, so some things may not work as intended, for example the Look Up Tables we store for tone and color. Having said that, the raw data is still the raw data, and any editor will access that without an issue, so you can keep using Indigo images that way without any concerns.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hi: I appreciate your update! My enjoyment with Indego has been exclusively with the jpgs produced from the app. I DO HAVE JPG+RAW enabled in the app. I can see the icon on the camera screen (upper left corner). BUT, I've NOT been able to find a way to view, extract, use, manipulate or experiment with a raw file. Can't find information anywhere. It's frustrating but given how good the JPG's look, I'm optimistic for the future once I get RAW file capabilities unlocked!

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hi: I appreciate your update! My enjoyment with Indego has been exclusively with the jpgs produced from the app. I DO HAVE JPG+RAW enabled in the app. I can see the icon on the camera screen (upper left corner). BUT, I've NOT been able to find a way to view, extract, use, manipulate or experiment with a raw file. Can't find information anywhere. It's frustrating but given how good the JPG's look, I'm optimistic for the future once I get RAW file capabilities unlocked!

By @chrisd40442477

For editing JPEGs it really is up to you which editor you want to use - the data is all "baked in", with the only exception being the HDR gain maps. The ISO standard for this is relatively new, so which editors out there handle it properly, if at all, is an unknown.

For accessing DNGs, this is already possible, albeit a bit cumbersome. You can find more information on that here: https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-reviews/project-indigo-the-best-camera-app-for-smart-pho...

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Hello: I did read the segment in the article that discusses accessing a raw image. The article mentions using Lightroom, which I stopped using a decade ago. Now being standardized on Capture One, I grabbed a jpg shot on Indigo, opened the file in C1Pro, and see no way to grab a raw file. I only still see the jpg in the finder on my Mac.

Report · Jul 10, 2025

Hello: I did read the segment in the article that discusses accessing a raw image. The article mentions using Lightroom, which I stopped using a decade ago. Now being standardized on Capture One, I grabbed a jpg shot on Indigo, opened the file in C1Pro, and see no way to grab a raw file. I only still see the jpg in the finder on my Mac.

By @chrisd40442477

Since you are using a Mac, follow bullet #3 in Greg Benz's explainer for how to get the DNG on your Mac. That is probably the easiest way for now.

Report · Jul 09, 2025

Took a indoor, decent lighting 2x SR, and it looks like it has spots of blotching due to denoising algorithms. Can also see denoising is way too strong because the pillow is microfiber, and all textures are lost. This is also exhibited in 10x, with movement very bad in 10x. Movement in 2X SR isn't too bad.

Report · Jul 11, 2025

@BorisTheBlade What are your thoughts on the 2x and 10x SR adjustments from the pictures I have shared?

Report · Jul 11, 2025

The team will be looking at these. Note that tuning image quality is not an easy thing - we have to look at hundreds/thousands of images to verify that we are not making many use-cases worse by improving one or two. So it will take time. Also, image quality is in many ways subjective: what looks good to you or I may not look good to others. Expect such improvements to roll in gradually over time. I will also be talking to the team about adding configurable post-processing so end users can, if they wish, tune it to their liking. If we decide to implement it, this will also take time. Indigo is experimental, and there are a lot of places we can improve things, but we cannot do them all at once.

Report · Jul 11, 2025

Absolutely agreed, that's why sharpness is always personal preference and blind tests by mkbhd always have phones that's brighter and sharper wins but it's not what photography is about, that's more so social media ready sadly. I just didn't want you to miss these critical findings as I go on my tests/real shootings. I just upload them as fast I see before I forget, do note that these scenes are really not normal scenes to shoot on the daily of course, but it's where they do show issues and will prevent loss of pictures once you actually want to save the picture you shot. Post processing to jpeg again is awesome for full control, and raws are more important as they are really fully controlled (needed to be) in lightroom or other editor.

Side note, would it be possible to take advantage of Apple's sensor and enable DCG for at least the main lens, with DCG, you do not need to tune as much and frames (jpg) do not need to be stacked as much as well for NR.

Report · Jul 11, 2025

Side note, would it be possible to take advantage of Apple's sensor and enable DCG for at least the main lens, with DCG, you do not need to tune as much and frames (jpg) do not need to be stacked as much as well for NR.

By @nhan_8084

As far as I am aware, control over the DCG is not exposed via iOS APIs. Either it is enabled by default for all camera apps requesting raw data, or it is not and we cannot enable it. But I'll double check. I am also not sure what the implications of using DCG off the sensor would be for the overall processing pipeline, assuming we can turn it on/off.

Report · Jul 16, 2025

Hi @BorisTheBlade sorry for the late reply. Please check with apple to request for DCG on all the time as when DCG is on, it is much better at handling shadow recovery areas if shot in high dynamic range scenes, and you do not need much frame stacking either! Typically 1 frame DCG will have minimal noises (both chroma and luma) versus without DCG as you are well aware of! Currently if apple is not allowing it, then it looks like the dcg is off, and let say if Indigo uses 1 frame for raw, it will be very noisy against sun.

Report · Jul 10, 2025

When editing Indigo JPEG files with the iOS Photos app, the color balance often changes wildly after tapping the save button. This suggests some incompatibility of the JPEG files with the iOS Photos app. I'm not sure if this is due to the embedded HDR profile or something else. To reproduce: apply automatic changes to some Indigo photos in the Photos app. Note that the colors look good before saving. After saving, the colors will sometimes shift so extremely that the photo becomes unusable. This is usually a shift towards purple or blue. iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 18.5, Indigo 1.0.2.