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: 

[Paul D Wenlock]

Good afternoon. Is there any way to get the raw and jpg files created by project Indigo to have the same file name. Currently they get allocated different file names which means you have to change the view order in Bridge to see the raw and jpg file side by side

[BorisTheBlade]

Good afternoon. Is there any way to get the raw and jpg files created by project Indigo to have the same file name. Currently they get allocated different file names which means you have to change the view order in Bridge to see the raw and jpg file side by side

By @Paul D Wenlock

Bridge uses PTP/MPT protocol, which limits the filename to 8 characters (+3 for extension), so it tends to assign random names to files. I am talking to the Bridge team about the possibility to try and modernize this, but in the meantime you can use the Advanced settings in the Photo Downloader to do batch renaming.

[lvogt48]

I have found that Pi heats up my 15 pro significantly. Too hot.   

[Sweet Light]

Still curious, has anyone else experience significant loss in file size? During a recent shoot, the 48mm and 200 mm created files that were 1512 X 2016 pixels, or about 3 MP. This is a significant reduction in file size. The iPhone 17 Pro was on a monopod, but there was slight movement of the camera even on the monopod.

[BorisTheBlade]

Still curious, has anyone else experience significant loss in file size? During a recent shoot, the 48mm and 200 mm created files that were 1512 X 2016 pixels, or about 3 MP. This is a significant reduction in file size. The iPhone 17 Pro was on a monopod, but there was slight movement of the camera even on the monopod.

By @Sweet Light

When you zoom in with digital zoom of 2x or more we employ multi-image super-resolution to recover the 2x of resolution drop. However, this can be turned off in the settings. To verify that it is still active, your 2x zoom button in Indigo should have an 'SR' badge on the top right. If it doesn't then this option has been disabled. You can enable it from the settings by swiping left on the histogram, clicking on the gear Settings icon and making sure the 'Burst SR' toggle is on.

Note that if you use Long Exposure (via Pro Controls in Night mode) super-resolution is NOT active, so the raw file size will be reduced.

[T__L]

When can we expect the next update? I feel like photos from the app from my 16 Pro took sharper photos.

[BorisTheBlade]

When can we expect the next update? I feel like photos from the app from my 16 Pro took sharper photos.

By @T__L

To clarify, are you saying that Indigo on 16 Pro took sharper photos than indigo on your new 17-series device?

[T__L]

That is correct, Indigo on my 16 Pro took sharper photos than Indigo on my 17 Pro.

I don't have my 16 Pro anymore of course so I can't really create new comparisons right now.

[OliverVW]

I would have to agree. My 17 Pro Max seems to smear images more leaving them with less detail than my 16PM. It seems more hit or miss now. 

[OliverVW]

Here are some photos I've taken. I've labeled if they were shot on the 16PM or 17PM. It just feels more smudgy/ smeary sometimes and less overall detail. Also these were all shot with super resolution, mostly 8x on the 17 and 10x on the 16. Some 2x put in there as well. Obviously it's not a perfect comparison as different conditions, but I tried to compile similiar photos between the two. -- hope this helps

[BorisTheBlade]

Here are some photos I've taken. I've labeled if they were shot on the 16PM or 17PM. It just feels more smudgy/ smeary sometimes and less overall detail. Also these were all shot with super resolution, mostly 8x on the 17 and 10x on the 16. Some 2x put in there as well. Obviously it's not a perfect comparison as different conditions, but I tried to compile similiar photos between the two. -- hope this helps

By @OliverVW

Thank you Oliver - we'll review these and see what we can find. From what I can tell these span the 5 months since Indigo launched, so there will be a mix of all app versions in there, not just the device model, correct? We are continuously tweaking things so it is possible that in one of the previous versions we had a regression of some kind.

[BorisTheBlade]

By @OliverVW

BTW, are you able to post these as DNGs via a file sharing service? Unfortunately, the forum platform does not allow for direct DNG sharing yet, and the jPEGs posted do get recoded (resized, metadata stripped, etc.), so we cannot do a full diagnostic eval on them. Especially for things like sharpness, having a DNG is extremely helpful. Thank you!

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade I noticed that in the Raw DNG after you import into lightroom mobile without touching anything else, the colors are pretty saturated.  I always have to adjust the saturation slider to -10 minimum to have the color accurate to what my eyes (20/20 vision) sees.  If you hit Reset and reset to all, then the DNG really looks like a flat DNG without the Indigo profile added to it, so I think it's the values you guys set in the metadata for that profile and can be adjusted.  Everything else is fine once I nuke the sharpening, and all noise reduction on the dng, with the white balance becoming personal preference as discussed before.

The Jpeg on my 17 pro max also seems to be more mushed/denoised especially at the SR zoom levels as mentioned and worse as the digital zooms increases.  I get that the team hasn't worked with the tuning aspect yet so I'll wait for the next releases, hopefully with the settings toggles of Off, Low, Medium and High for Sharpening, Noise Reductions!

[OliverVW]

Here you go! Let me know if you would like me to add more photos to compare. I have hundreds! 

And yes there are definitely a mix of versions in there as I've had indigo downloaded since it first came out.
Google Drive link  

[BorisTheBlade]

Thank you, Oliver - I'll pass the DNGs along. Note that it is oftentimes difficult to reproduce the same results from someone else in a camera, because they may depend on a whole lot of things:

• App version
• Device model
• Individual device characteristics (they are not all the same - FAR from it)
• Shooting conditions
• App settings (capture mode, capture parameters)
• Amount of handshake

If you are able to identify a set of conditions that reliably produce the subpar results you are seeing, that would help us tremendously. We appreciate your help in debugging this issue.

[????????_4983]

@BorisTheBlade I can tell you when the super res zoom produces soft results. Basically if you shoot any scene with motion these areas get massively denoised, they appear to have also a lot of sharpening to them to compensate even if i have turned the sharpening down to 0 in lightroom. Also even when there are no moving subjects in the frame when shooting at 2x on my iphone 14 with super res zoom things like grass or foliage tend to have the same denoised and sharpened plasticky look with lack of detail and in other areas there is a lot more detail but foliage and grass suffers the most. There are also misalignmnets sometimes and artifacts when shooting with srz ag night. If you manage to do as good of a job with this algorithm as google did with their super res zoom which produced 2x more detail without these problems even when having motion in the scene i would be glad to test it and to provide more detailed feedback.

[nhan_8084]

I have mentioned this several times to them, I think they are aware so let's give them some times to tune the algorithm in the next release as we know most of these release are focus on bug fix mainly and the new 17 series support.  For your iPhone 14 (base), the sensor is not good so the SR will be worse than the newer generation sensors.  Hopefully the team can experiment more with the new 17 series, and tune high frequency foliages as I mentioned along with SR zoom levels.

[????????_4983]

@nhan_8084 I dont think in daylight the sensor matters that much for super res zoom and i definetely think these soft areas and oversharpening and motion artefacts are not due to the iphone 14 sensor as it has a much better sensor than the pixel 3 for example which did not have these artefacts albeit it had overall softer image at 2x srz overall but the 14 has the potential to match the 15 as it has almost the same sensor size so i think the algorithm needs better alignment and merging and improved handling of areas with motion and less denoising, oversharpening in areas where the algorithm cant align/merge due to motion and falls back to single frame upscaled. Google did a very good job of hiding these areas to look acceptable and not really noticeable so i think Adobe can as well it just needs time.

[nhan_8084]

Yes, the tuning def needs to be reworked as I showed a bunch of samples from my own P9 pro xl, and the Oneplus Open using google camera mods with my own settings and it blows Indigo out the water even with different sensors used.  But Indigo is new, smaller team than what Gcam was built upon so it will take time.

[T__L]

Why not go the route that Moment went with their Moment Pro Camera II app and create a Discord channel? That way, we can directly communicate with you guys (the devs) and directly provide feedback and examples.

It's a much faster way to provide feedback, provide examples, and share examples to everyone.

[photopoeth]

SORRY for posting this. Unfortunately I cannot delete this posting. I just found that this issue has been discussed a couple of days ago.  So please ignorieren this posting.

------------ ignore below -----------

How does SR work with DNG-only? Is it really the case that you can only achieve 12 MP at 2x zoom on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, for example, as a JPG, and end up with only 3 MP with DNG-only?

I'm sorry, but I have to admit that I don't seem to have fully understood the SR concept in Pi yet. Why can't you use the 48 MP mode and then the 12 MP crop in 2x zoom mode with Pi?

[photopoeth]

I have just dicovered that Pi doesn't write the camera direction into the EXIF data. It's a minor issue but maybe it is not the only data field that gets stripped. So checking if all metadata available gets written to the file maybe is worth putting on the todo list for the future.

[nnhuy]

@BorisTheBlade Hello, I posted here a couple months ago asking about dramatically different saturation levels between the SDR and HDR looks, especially in shots with skies and clouds. I wasn't able to provide .DNGs back then, but now here is a shared folder of several different shots in .DNG+.JPG further demonstrating the problem. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WFa2mTelBAp9VVWXIg4lVGCOvenyRrUj?usp=sharing

Again, I don't have an opinion on which look is correct. I just do not want there to be drastic changes in image "feel" when switching between SDR and HDR, especially because iOS/MacOS will also freely swap between variants with changing low-power-mode, ambient lighting, etc.