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 · Oct 13, 2025

Yes. Indigo uses computational stacking to reduce noise like in google camera hdr+ mode. Marc Levoy and the google team have released a paper for night sight and night sight is different from hdr+ in that it uses the google super res zoom align and merge to merge the frames so it offers better resolution compared to hdr+ so using night sight in daylight on pixel devices offered improved detail and resolution vs using hdr+ mode. So if indigo is using similar algorithm to hdr+ which i think it is then can you integrate the super res zoom algorithm align and merge into the night mode to improve image clarity,resolution in daylight when using the night mode?

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Yes. Indigo uses computational stacking to reduce noise like in google camera hdr+ mode. Marc Levoy and the google team have released a paper for night sight and night sight is different from hdr+ in that it uses the google super res zoom align and merge to merge the frames so it offers better resolution compared to hdr+ so using night sight in daylight on pixel devices offered improved detail and resolution vs using hdr+ mode. So if indigo is using similar algorithm to hdr+ which i think it is then can you integrate the super res zoom algorithm align and merge into the night mode to improve image clarity,resolution in daylight when using the night mode?

By @powerful_Elixir5E29

OK, now I understand. Currently super-resolution is used in both Photo and Night modes when you digitally zoom in. We are experimenting with using super-resolution in situations when there is no digital zoom, but for that we are cognizant of the computational cost and need to keep the runtime in check. Over time we will update every single algorithm we use, but we cannot do them all at once.

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Boris - am I correct in saying that the Night Mode with Merge & Align set to a single frame essentially operates in a way somewhat similar to Halide's popular "Process Zero", but with Project Indigo flavor on the processed JPEG vs. whatever light processing Halide does on the Bayer Raw file?

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Boris - am I correct in saying that the Night Mode with Merge & Align set to a single frame essentially operates in a way somewhat similar to Halide's popular "Process Zero", but with Project Indigo flavor on the processed JPEG vs. whatever light processing Halide does on the Bayer Raw file?

By @Moonboots22

If you manually select to capture only 1 frame, then yes, there will be no "computational raw DNG" - there is only one raw frame captured and stored. We still run our look after that to define the tone and color, as well as sharpening and denoising parameters, and those will be used to generate the JPEG, but the raw will be a pure single-frame raw.