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: 

[Astrodon]

As a long-time astrophotographer, this is great.  I would like to see the ability to focus on a star by having an enlarged subframe or zoomed window, as is done in my mirrorless cameras.  The 3s delay in the beginning is  good to have, but if you are going to set the number of frames equal to infinity, you also need a means to stop the exposures without touching the iPhone, which will destroy pinpoint stars if you are using a tracker, for example.  I have a bluetooth remote control for the iPhone. It shows as ABShutter3 in the Bluetooth device list.  I've verified that it can start the Pi exposure and stop the exposure without touching the iPhone.  Actually, with the bluetooth remote, you don't need the 3s delay.  I understand that you can't depend upon a 3rd party product, but at least it's possible.   I'm curious.  Is the technology available for alignment to align on stars?  Looking forward to this.

[BorisTheBlade]

Hi everyone. I wanted to share a brief update regarding iPhone 17-series support in Indigo. We are putting finishing touches on a build which will run on those devices and hope to release it within a few days. This build will not support the front camera on iPhone 17 devices - a new build which includes the front camera will be released once iOS 26.1 is released. Thank you all for your patience.

[oskar27]

I really have appreciated the work Adobe put into starting this project, and I changed my default camera to Project Indigo. But I got the iPhone 17 when it was released, and couldn't wait any longer for the update. I switched to Pro-Cam by Tinkerworks. It's been going very well, but I hope the new Project release will win me back. The unreliability for the app support is a big concern when needing a steady go-to that I know will work as expected. Maybe down the road it will move from "project" status to a permanet fixture in the Adobe family of tools.

[nhan_8084]

@oskar27 you can always use Halide, or even lightroom mobile raw for your own tuning.

[T__L]

Please release it today, the wait is killing some of us with iPhone 17's lol

[Moonboots22]

Awesome! Outside of iPhone 17 support, anything else fun shipping with this forthcoming update, Boris?

[BorisTheBlade]

Awesome! Outside of iPhone 17 support, anything else fun shipping with this forthcoming update, Boris?

By @Moonboots22

This build is really focused on enabling the app to work on 17-series devices. Other things included are bug fixes and minor improvements.

[default0i09akcya5ak]

In recent history, the new iOS has been released in the last week of October.

[Deulhadj28109761hqsn]

I absolutely love the Project Indigo app! It’s such a relief to finally take photos that look naturally beautiful instead of being over-processed like on the stock app.

However the processing time slows down shooting a lot, especially when you’re out and about capturing moments on the go.

Here’s a simple suggestion = if possible please implement a “Process Later” option.

That way, we could

• Snap photos freely without waiting for each one to process.
• Save battery while out and about.
• Review and process our favorite shots later (for example, when back home while charging).

It would make the shooting experience so much smoother just capture the moment and enjoy it, without missing anything because of the processing time.

[BorisTheBlade]

I absolutely love the Project Indigo app! It’s such a relief to finally take photos that look naturally beautiful instead of being over-processed like on the stock app.

However the processing time slows down shooting a lot, especially when you’re out and about capturing moments on the go.

Here’s a simple suggestion = if possible please implement a “Process Later” option.

That way, we could

• Snap photos freely without waiting for each one to process.
• Save battery while out and about.
• Review and process our favorite shots later (for example, when back home while charging).

It would make the shooting experience so much smoother just capture the moment and enjoy it, without missing anything because of the processing time.

By @Deulhadj28109761hqsn

Thank you for sharing this idea - we are indeed looking into something like this. The sheer amount of data Indigo processes for each shot is really large (in Night mode, up to 32 12MP raw frames), and writing all that data to storage each time a photo is captured also requires time and power, so we need to balance all things out. But there are some exciting user experience possibilities with this approach and we are eager to experiment with them.

[T__L]

I can only assume processing will be a lot faster with iPhone 17 Pros with 512GB of storage or more. It's been proven that the higher capacity iPhone 17's have faster storage speeds.

[Snow34]

I noticed that the app white balance (or algorithm) has a tendency to de a blue hue (as you can see in the shared pictures) in the shadow area instead of a black or warmer one. 
Generally it's this hint that allow me to instantly know if a picture has been taken with project indigo.

is it an artefact or the intended signature of the computational photography algorithm ?

[zach_6412]

My favorite app, PERIOD ! I love the photos this camera captures and I am so sad I haven't been able to use it with my iPhone 17 Pro! Please don't give up and update as soon as you can so I can start taking my favorite pictures again!!

[Rudolf_Steiner4877]

hallo

ein tolles und gelungenes kamera-app dass ich täglich verwende... wenn ich kann! leider funktiniert es nicht mehr bei meinem neuen iphone 17 promax... und indigo fehlt mir... sehr.

ich wünsch uns, ich wünsche mir, das ihr das projekt indigo auch auf die neuen iphone 17 und 17 promax zugänglich macht... denn indigo ist das app was die kamera von apple iphone braucht!

herzliche grüsse,

rudolf