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 
 
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[nhan_8084]

Attached here is a night scene consisting of streetlights that is tinted led vs daylight color led or the halogen yellow and orange street light typically seen.  All shot is done without night mode, nothing else touched.

Indigo kept the color rendition this time very good vs stock, the light color was that blue vs the purple tone from stock.  Jpeg from Indigo is very soft, no details at all vs stock which has very good amount of fine details and not extensive oversharpening applied.  The raw of Indigo is great.  I have attached crops of the area of interest showing default profile look of Indigo vs nuking sharpening and noise reduction, and applying color noise reduction to 10 vs 25.  This look should be applied as the default jpeg output as it allows a balance of sharpness to noise ratio, and snr at this iso is expected.  The foliages rendered very nicely imo now.

[nhan_8084]

Here's another low light shot indoor using the 4x tele.  The light source is my tv to the left so it's quite dim.  The speaker grills are not visible to the human eyes from the distance of about 15' to the phone.  Stock did amazingly well picking up the individual mesh sizes of the speaker grill while Indigo cannot render anything at all in the picture.

All shots auto as usual, no night mode used.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade I took a look back at this slide you sent a few months back and sent to couple of mobile camera enthusiasts on telegram and they seem to be bothered by the word "processed" in the begining portion of the steps.  They kept thinking that apple's bayer raw is still baked in similar to proraw.  Can you explain what that word of "processed" means?

[nhan_8084]

Another low light scene, with mixtures of lighting that includes xmas decors and street lamp, both different color temperatures.  All shot auto, no night mode in Indigo and in stock.

Indigo 1x shot fars way better than the 4x version, which is extremely unusable vs stock 4x.  I also included the rendered Indigo dng to jpeg that I think is manageable vs the default ouput with settings I used vs the default metadata set by Indigo.

[nhan_8084]

Had to attach more as it has limited me due to the sizes. @BorisTheBlade Tag u to not miss any of this.