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: 

[BorisTheBlade]

@BorisTheBlade2 Please respond or if I could

reach an engineer to discuss?

By @nhan_8084

About the first example (merge artifacts for 10x super-res zoom), they can appear, more so in Night mode, if the subject is moving during capture. We will be further tuning and optimizing the super-res algorithm to minimize such occurences.

On the white balance, Indigo does not emply a custom AWB. Instead, it uses AWB routine provided by the OS. Sometimes it can be off, which is when using Pro controls can help to achieve good WB quickly: you can simply tap on a neutral grey colored object and WB will be set correctly.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade  thank you so much for the reply!  I was very glad to have been able to get a response from a dev or engineer as yourself!  I compared two scenes vs Apple's own stock camera, both at 12mp to be fair.  Indoor scene with hdr, I was quite impressed with PI having no artificial sharpening vs Apple's own heic.  There's still some strong denoise applied but it's manageable.  The HDR is lacking vs apple as I understand it does not have expo bracketing yet.  

However, outdoors scene is very mushy, loss of fine details such as brick structures, and foliages on trees appears as clumps due to denoising applied.  The apple files were heic(the ones with better hdr ofc) was resaved to jpeg via lightroom mobile as I cannot attach heic here.

About the super res shot you replied to, that shot was not taken in night mode nor was the subject moving at all.  I suggest having discard blurry frames upon merging and possibly stacking of no more than 10 frames.  

As with most stock and third party camera app, they lack the ability of having noise reduction settings such as for luma, chroma, and spatial lumas, and sharpening are on some but not all.  I am heavily involved in google camera application that was modded by various devs.  Thanks you to Marc for bringing it to google apk btw!  I will attach a sample of my own tuning image via that application.

The one named Skyyking are from google camera version 9.6 modified as shot jpeg no edits.  I am aiming to achieve this look and details even when cropping in 300-400%, it is very good vs stock and PI currently.  I hope PI will allow for tuning denoising and sharpening parameters as mentioned.  I am always eager to discuss so please pass these images to your team and to Marc.  I have been awaiting for PI to be the google camera replacement and better for iOS!

[BorisTheBlade]

Hi - thank you for your message. The team appreciates your detailed notes and thoughts about how Indigo could improve going forward. As has been noted previously, this is an experimental app, with the goal for the team to gather feedback from users such as yourself, iterate, and see what satisfies user needs and what doesn't. There are so many things we could do, but we will need to prioritize while looking at the totality of user asks.

[nhan_8084]

Hello @BorisTheBlade and other engineers/devs, I am very impressed by Levoy's google camera (gcam) and I am very happy PI is created and is very well usable now in it's early stages.  I am glad to always create inputs to someone who cares as to me this application isn't simply just a point and shoot because people will use stock app for that!  My detail analysis and suggestion involved a lot of testing on my end so I really hope PI team put it to use soon!  Also please make it a way so raw is viewable in the default photos app or the google photos viewer for easy sharing as I do not use my laptop much, and want everything to strictly focus on mobile.  Most app allows sharing dng via gphotos or accessible via clients like telegram, so PI should do this as well.  

[ronh45669430]

HI, this app looks amazing but I only have an IPhone 11 Pro Max. Does this mean I can't use the app with this phone?

[BorisTheBlade2]

HI, this app looks amazing but I only have an IPhone 11 Pro Max. Does this mean I can't use the app with this phone?

By @ronh45669430

Hello - for the time being, Indigo camera requires at least a 12 Pro/Pro Max device to run. For better experience we recommend using 15 Pro/Pro Max or newer models.

[@sydneylow]

Does the JPEG file contain a depth map that's passed onto Lightroom to add "Blur"?

[BorisTheBlade2]

Does the JPEG file contain a depth map that's passed onto Lightroom to add "Blur"?

By @sydneylow

Hello,

JPEGs produced by the Indigo camera do not yet contain a depth map which Lightroom can use for the Lens Blur feature. We will be investigating adding a depth map to files captured by Indigo in the future.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade , apple allows lidar for AR use, will PI be able to use that information to create true depth map vs the computational depth of google camera?  That would be much easier vs training ML models, and needing hundreds of photos data on a server like what google did for their portrait matting. 

[Curtis Hight]

In the blog post (Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, “Project Indigo - a computational photography camera app,” Adobe, June 13, 2025), as I read down, I saw the slow-drip water photos, then the external strobe, and then the words “As a fun example of how our manual controls can be used….” Excitement stirred in my heart that the following words would say something about an upcoming version of Indigo supporting electronic strobe synchronization. Alas, not. But I hope so!

[BorisTheBlade]

In the blog post (Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, “Project Indigo - a computational photography camera app,” Adobe, June 13, 2025), as I read down, I saw the slow-drip water photos, then the external strobe, and then the words “As a fun example of how our manual controls can be used….” Excitement stirred in my heart that the following words would say something about an upcoming version of Indigo supporting electronic strobe synchronization. Alas, not. But I hope so!

By @Curtis Hight

Hi Curtis - thank you for your thoughts. Indigo doesn't yet support strobe synchronization, but we can add it to the list of feature asks and consider it in a future version.

[fdisilvestro]

Thanks for developing this app. A nice addition would be to add a remote for the Apple Watch, as other camera apps have. This will be usefull for night or long exposures.

[BorisTheBlade2]

Hello - thank you for your email and your suggestion. Adding Apple Watch controls for Indigo is something we are planning to do in the future.

[Harald5C31]

Hi, great idea, great concepts. Just did some tests, my first feedback:

I love the tips: move back or go to macro - but where can I enable macro when I know I want to do macro?

second issue:

I' m on a iPhone 12 pro, I get constantly the warning:  iPhone overheating blah blah. Yes it gets warm. Maybe some tweaking of the code necessary?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hi Harald, thank you for your interest in Project Indigo and your feedback. Currently there is no way to manually enable the Macro mode. It is on our TODO list to explore ways to nicely expose Macro as a user-selectable mode. On the thermal issues with some devices, especially older ones, we are aware of the reports from our customers and we are taking them seriously. The team is exploring options for further optimizations and will roll out improvements as they become available.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade it seems that macro mode activated on 5x if face is detected and subject is too close!  I saw this function yesterday when trying to photo shoot my son, and he was too close to the lens vs  the allowed focal length.  The macro mode triggers ultra wide angle mode, if you try this on objects it doesn't work.

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for sharing your use case for Macro. Can you explain a bit more when did Macro work vs not, and what did you expect it to do differently?

[钦琛312276963m1b]

Hi,

I am really excited this app but as I was trying this app on my 16pro, it seems not working and only showing a black screen. Wondering if there's any solotions?

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for reaching out, and sorry for the troubles you are facing. Can you share some more information about the symptoms you are seeing: is the UI also frozen or does tapping on buttons do anything, which country is your device/Apple account from, how long have you tried leaving Indigo with the black viewfinder?

There are 3 things you can try:

• Try to run the native camera app and then switch back to Indigo.
• Try to restart the device.
• Try to completely remove Indigo and reinstall from scratch.

Let me know if any of these helped, and thank you for your patience!

[acocoadog_8447]

Hello Development Team,

I'm observing that photos taken with my iPhone 15 Pro's camera are displaying a pink tint. Has this issue been reported by other users? My device is running iOS 18.5.

 

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for reporting the issue. This is not previously known to the team: can you share a DNG with us so we can inspect it in more details? Also, can you share some more details about when the issue appears:

• is it for every capture, or just some?
• does it depend on the mode, e.g., more common in Night mode?
• how does it react when you manually change white balance?
• how does it react when you manually change the exposure settings (shutter speed or iso)?

To get the DNG to your computer, you can use a cable connection for transfer, or if you have a Mac, in Apple photos you can use AirDrop but make sure to go to 'Options' in top left and click on the "All Photos Data" toggle.

[acocoadog_8447]

Here is my DNG file.（https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b3rovjvl3wi0iaanrgtdt/IMG_8662.dng?rlkey=6jibzqzpu705m5os3pof606i6&st...
The issue occurs consistently in every test I’ve done, and reinstalling the app did not resolve it.

It does not seem to depend on Night Mode, manually changing white balance, or adjusting exposure settings (shutter speed or ISO) — the problem persists regardless of these factors.

Also, it doesn't appear to be an isolated case. Another iPhone 15 Pro user running iOS 18.5 on social media has reported experiencing the same issue.

[BorisTheBlade]

Thank you for sharing the file and the additional details. I managed to download it and will forward it to the team for evaluation.

[acocoadog_8447]

All the devices known to have this issue were purchased in mainland China and are logged into Apple ID registered in China. However, the App Store accounts used to download the Indigo app were from Italy and the United States, respectively.
I hope this information is helpful to your investigation. I might try to gather more feedback from other users who are experiencing the same issue through social media.

[BorisTheBlade]

All the devices known to have this issue were purchased in mainland China and are logged into Apple ID registered in China. However, the App Store accounts used to download the Indigo app were from Italy and the United States, respectively.
I hope this information is helpful to your investigation. I might try to gather more feedback from other users who are experiencing the same issue through social media.

By @acocoadog_8447

Thank you for the context. Can you tell me which iOS version are you running on these devices?