P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Melden · 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

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Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

@BorisTheBlade these samples behaves similar to the 10x SR I showed before while I was shopping at Costco, it was bright indoors condition then vs the night time condition here. Although digital zoom should not be stacking the same algorithm as the SR so it might be a completely different issue? At the mentioned ss 1/800s and high iso, unless the luma levels programmed into Indigo trips wrongly into reducing noise and blurs the face weirdly, that ss should be fast enough to not have motion blur issues for the faces. The high iso and high shutter speed should just have evenly fine grains right, like if you would take on dslr albeit it's 1 frame?

Is it possible to have Indigo to also have a one frame in both jpeg and raw option in the manual section to eliminate any of this motion issue, similar to how Halide does their Process Zero?

By @nhan_8084

One can always choose to capture a single frame in Pro Controls. In some situations that can really show just how bad these small sensors can be, especially in low light. It's not a coincidence that Halide recommends their "Process Zero" for well illuminated scenes - that is because in low light it would just mostly look poor. Having said that, we will be working on ways to make scenes like this better, or at least finding ways to give easier control to the user to pick how they want their images processed. This will likely require a lot of UX experimentation on our side so it may take us some time to ship something we are happy with.

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

Ok, great I will keep in mind to select 1 frame in the pro controls. The tele and uwa has improved quite a bit, eventhough it is still smaller when looking at the competitors on the China side of phones having a 1/1.4" or a decent 1/2" periscope vs the 1/2.55" on apple devices.

Melden · Sep 29, 2025

I think the SDR base's color saturation should more closely match the HDR grade's saturation. Attached are two photos I took where the SDR desaturation (or rather, saturation difference) felt egregious. Look at the sky and the brown-red buildings in each.

Melden · Sep 29, 2025

It looks like the forum's built-in preview only loads the SDR base, but if you download the JPGs, the HDR gainmaps are embedded.

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

It looks like the forum's built-in preview only loads the SDR base, but if you download the JPGs, the HDR gainmaps are embedded.

By @nnhuy

Thank you for sharing these examples. It is on our radar to improve the SDR look (we have focused more on HDR as that is the default experience), and I will pass this information along to the team to consider when doing so.

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

I think the SDR base's color saturation should more closely match the HDR grade's saturation. Attached are two photos I took where the SDR desaturation (or rather, saturation difference) felt egregious. Look at the sky and the brown-red buildings in each.

By @nnhuy

Can you elaborate how exactly these photos were made and saved on your computer before you shared them on the forum? Did you do any work in Camera Raw Lightroom to import/export them?

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

Can you elaborate how exactly these photos were made and saved on your computer before you shared them on the forum? Did you do any work in Camera Raw Lightroom to import/export them?

By @BorisTheBlade

No work in Lightroom. The JPGs were obtained either via Airdrop (with "All Photo Data" activated under the Options submenu before airdropping) unto Mac or via a personal app I have to duplicate the representation .jpg/.heif from RAW/ProRAW assets on iOS (via NSItemProvider loadFileRepresentation). I freely use both, so I don't recall which method was done here.

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

Can you elaborate how exactly these photos were made and saved on your computer before you shared them on the forum? Did you do any work in Camera Raw Lightroom to import/export them?

By @BorisTheBlade

No work in Lightroom. The JPGs were obtained either via Airdrop (with "All Photo Data" activated under the Options submenu before airdropping) unto Mac or via a personal app I have to duplicate the representation .jpg/.heif from RAW/ProRAW assets on iOS (via NSItemProvider loadFileRepresentation). I freely use both, so I don't recall which method was done here.

By @nnhuy

Thanks. The metadata is stripped from the files so we cannot inspect them properly. I would recommend to use AirDrop and share the images again. This forum may also strip JPEG metadata, in which case uploading them to a file sharing service may be the only way to get the correct files over to us for triage.

Melden · Sep 29, 2025

JPEG photos synced by Microsoft OneDrive are given the file extension .heic. The data in the files are still the same and doing a checksum comparison with the same photos synced by iCloud confirms this.

Melden · Sep 30, 2025

JPEG photos synced by Microsoft OneDrive are given the file extension .heic. The data in the files are still the same and doing a checksum comparison with the same photos synced by iCloud confirms this.

By @chubby_puppy

Thank you for sharing. That is some OneDrive weirdness... we'll try it out but it would be on Microsoft to fix this issue.

Melden · 30.09.2025

Apparently according to the user in this post, Photoshop Elements 2025 with Camera Raw installed will not open the dng files from Project Indigo.

My first thought is HDR in Project Indigo was used and that's the reason, but still waiting for user response.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-elements-discussions/dng-files-from-project-indigo-won-t-op...

Melden

I have a question about indigo please. I've been using this on an iPhone 16 and results on the phone are so good I've started to use it as my default camera but have now come up against a problem which I can't resolve. When I transfer the dng file to my Mac and do some further processing the dng file looks as I want it. But when I export this file into tif and jpg formats the quality deteriorates enormously and the file is no longer useable. This may have been dealt with before but I can't resolve this and will have to revert to using the iPhone camera instead. I've tried changing the colour space to all other options but nothing works. Any solutions?

Melden

Thank you for developing this app. I recently upgraded from 16pro Max to 17pro Max. I found that I can't use indigo. I haven't taken photos for more than a week (the sharpening of the iOS camera makes me unable to arouse interest). Please support the 17 series quickly, please. . Another question: Can a switch about HDR be set for framing and photo preview? Hdr preview/shooting not only consumes power for me, but also has to press and hold the mobile phone screen to switch to sdr every time I look at photos (of course, hdr also has many benefits, so I wonder if I can add a corresponding switch?), thank you!