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]

Oops!  @BorisTheBlade try now!

[BorisTheBlade]

Now it works - thanks. I am not sure however what your ask is. exactly A DNG is a raw file, and while Indigo does have a look which is embedded in the DNG as metadata, it can be completely ignored: one just changes the profile in Lightroom and the image will look completely different. Also, only Adobe products (Camera Raw and Lightroom) can read and apply those profiles correctly anyway.

If you are talking about the look itself, that would be more applicable to JPEGs, which is still a fair topic to raise, but it is difficult to compare across different scenes. The best way would be to have the same scene, and then share one DNG with straight-out-of-the-camera from Indigo, and another with your edits which show how you would like it to look. I appreciate this is not that easy to do, and you have already went through great lengths to try and share your critique of the look we are applying. I am just trying to figure out how to make your feedback actionable for the team to evaluate.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade sorry for the confusion.  I should have elaborated more!  The PI DNG is to show the issues I mentioned to you in regarding to the jagged edges and purple aberration that you said you had an idea what caused it but needed the dng.  The google camera raw I sent wasn't to be compared to the dng of PI, but to just show what I mentionec before about having PI able to do DCG in raw dng.  As you see the DCG allowed the sun to be properly exposed without completely clipping it if you were to slide the highlight slider in lightroom mobile to the left, let say -40 like I attached a crop of the processed jpg of it.

As for the PI raw, I usually edit as is but now I can see what you mean by changing profiles to let say Adobe Standard, but still without DCG, the sun highlight recovery is not as good as the google camera with DCG (sorry I know they are not same conditions I know).  

I will attempt to do a PI dng edit vs the straight out of camera PI jpg just so you can get an idea of the minimal processing I mean for the straight out of camera jpg.

[schwartzworks]

I have tested the Indigo app on an iPhone 16 Pro and I have to say it looks very promising. Even though the app still is under development the results usually look very good, clearly better compared to the native apps. Also, the "Indigo" profile in Lightroom Mobile works well. For the issues still remaining - is there a possibility for a "bug report"? I have occasionally seen weird local color casts and lack of detail. I do not necessarily want to share the images here, but if this would be the only way to provide feedback I will do so.

[mino21]

This is more for the future, when Indigo will be released out of beta. Photomerge in Photoshop does not work correctly with RAW images from Indigo. So far, I have encountered two problems with different panoramas.

1, Panoramas were not merged at all. Photoshop opened three layers (three images were taken), but the resulting image was just the middle image. Left and right image were shown as black masks in the layers section (bottom right of the screen) but did not appear at all in the image itself. When converted to standard SDR JPEGs, Photomerge stitched them flawlessly.

2, The next one consisted of two images. This time, stitching process was successful geometrically, but the colours were off. Left image seemed like it was converted to SDR, the right one was very contrasty. Again, when manually converted to SDR JPEGs first and attempted to apply Photomerge, there were no problems and colours were fine (both halves had the same contrast).

[Russ Wright]

I'm using Lightroom Classic to merge my images into a pano and sometimes have simiular issues but most of the time it works well. The problem I see is that the exposure is wildly different across the pano. I'd say this happens mayb 20% of the time. When this happens, about half the time it asks me if this is a HDR pano and I say no. Maybe I should say yes and see what it does.

I'm running iOS 26 beta (1 and 2 when I was using Indigo on my vacation- yes, I'm crazy) so was assuming it was a problem due to the beta of iOS.
I also had images where the border was unfinished and was often getting the overheating error (first version of Indigo only).

[BorisTheBlade]

Thank you both for reporting this issue. I will raise this issue with the engineering team responsible for panorama stitching.

[Russ Wright]

Today I realized the exposure issue in panos isn't confined to Indigo generated images. I just found two Apple Camera RAW images that were shot in HDR that had this same issue so looks like a Lightroom Classic issue that could be related to HDR somehow. I've attached the 2 photos. 

[Russ Wright]

well, it wouldn't let me add the photos. Let me know how to get to the lightroom team and I'm happy to do so.

[BorisTheBlade]

well, it wouldn't let me add the photos. Let me know how to get to the lightroom team and I'm happy to do so.

By @Russ Wright

Thank you Russ - it may be best to contact the Lightroom Classic team directly on that community board: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic/ct-p/ct-lightroom-classic?page=1&sort=latest_replie...

[Russ Wright]

Ok, thanks. Just posed there.

Russ

[BorisTheBlade]

This is more for the future, when Indigo will be released out of beta. Photomerge in Photoshop does not work correctly with RAW images from Indigo. So far, I have encountered two problems with different panoramas.

1, Panoramas were not merged at all. Photoshop opened three layers (three images were taken), but the resulting image was just the middle image. Left and right image were shown as black masks in the layers section (bottom right of the screen) but did not appear at all in the image itself. When converted to standard SDR JPEGs, Photomerge stitched them flawlessly.

2, The next one consisted of two images. This time, stitching process was successful geometrically, but the colours were off. Left image seemed like it was converted to SDR, the right one was very contrasty. Again, when manually converted to SDR JPEGs first and attempted to apply Photomerge, there were no problems and colours were fine (both halves had the same contrast).

By @mino21

Thank you for reporting this. Can I ask you to post the input images on the forum so we can have some idea for what the use case is? I know that posting DNGs is not yet possible on the forum (we are following up on that with the forum team), but if you can put them on a file-sharing service and share the link, that would be best. And even JPEGs or screenshots would give us more information about what may be going on. Thank you for helping us triaging the issue.

[Russ Wright]

I posted exposure issue images in this post:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/camera-raw-bugs/p-pano-merge-of-iphone-hdr-images-result-in-uneven-ex...

[jimf16377877]

I love Project Indigo! I would like to make the following suggestion/feature request: Having some of the controls always visible at the edges of the frame makes composition difficult at times. It would be great if there was some way to hide them and have a clear field of view after everything is set up for an exposure. 

[BorisTheBlade]

Thank you for trying Project Indigo and for your feedback. We are aware of the preference by some users to be able to have a "clean" viewfinder when framing, and we are exploring ways for the UI to expose this functionality. Please stay tuned for updates such as that one.

[BroodjeKroket]

Not sure if this is mentioned before, but I notice that when in the Filmpstrip or even when in the Settings-dialog the camera-usage green-led stays lit. This is clearly different than the default iPhone camera.

And even when running AI models, the green led indicator stays lit.

Does that mean that Project Indigo is still keeping on making photo's, even when not necessary?

If so, this would be a nice improvement.

[BorisTheBlade]

Not sure if this is mentioned before, but I notice that when in the Filmpstrip or even when in the Settings-dialog the camera-usage green-led stays lit. This is clearly different than the default iPhone camera.

And even when running AI models, the green led indicator stays lit.

Does that mean that Project Indigo is still keeping on making photo's, even when not necessary?

If so, this would be a nice improvement.

By @BroodjeKroket

Thank you for your feedback. Indigo doesn't capture any images while in the filmstrip, we just keep some aspects of the camera system running to enable fast return back to the viewfinder. If we turned the camera completely off we would need to start it from scratch, and that would incur delays every time users wanted to quicky get back and take a new snapshot. We will keep optimizing every aspect of the app, and will consider shutting the camera system down completely while in the filmstrip if we can achieve fast enough startup times.

[ambitious_Explorer5534]

Hello. At this point, have you managed to get the raw 48 megapixel images yet?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello. At this point, have you managed to get the raw 48 megapixel images yet?

By @ambitious_Explorer5534

Hello - as mentioned elsewhere on this forum, Apple is not providing more than 12MP raw images to 3rd party apps, so we cannot offer 48MP output yet. If higher resolution input becomes available, we will make use of it.

[WillSnaps]

First I'd like to say thank you for making Indigo! It's really fantastic. I have a request: in the blog post you mentioned you'll be bringing video to Indigo. PLEASE make something like a "Night mode" for video! I suppose it couldn't work exactly same way as photo night mode, but I'm sure there's a way of making a video night mode. The newer Google Pixel phones already do this, they call it video Night Sight. I think the Indigo team could do an even better job at video night mode!

[RolandIEmbraceTheBlur]

* i tried a cheapie bluetooth remote and it was terrible 🙂 it's easier for me 🙂 just to tap the screen

* I continue to love the app: https://flic.kr/p/2rkjGSX <-- 25x zoom photo of a taiko singer yesterday at the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver, Canada. I wouldn't have got this shot with any other app. Thanks team!

* Embrace the blur! This app is ALSO great at making blurry photos which I love (Pro Mode 1/30 of a second and/or slow shutter mode, both are great) https://flic.kr/p/2rjHi7y 

[Hans N 25]

Got the sun yesterday wild fire smoke from out west here in Michigan 

 

[Hans N 25]

I couldn't edit the above post, it was shot using 14 pro @ 6X SR fantastic detail much better than the iPhone at the same crop. I like the app for night and telephoto shots

[Tom_Buckley7182]

This has probably been brought up before. If I take a photo with P.I., edit with the native Apple camera or Snapseed then open it in Lightroom Mobile it reverts back to the original photo taken with P.I. Camera. Why is that?

[michaelb79622326]

It's really magic. Like my old Pixel 4a. Today I stopped in the Forrest where I made some nice pictures years ago with my old Pixel. Now I watched at the photo at home and I'm really impressed. PI catches the colors really good. And I like how it shows the street.

The Photo comes from the 13Pro. Unedited.

Don't give up hope on the iphones. The real Pixel style is very near. 

PI gave me the hope, to stay with a Apple phone 🙂
Please don´t change this colors, DEV Team.
This is exactly what we love 🙂

Thank you so so much