Skip to main content
Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
May 23, 2025

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

  • May 23, 2025
  • 414 replies
  • 245181 views

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 thiProject 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. 

 

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: 

 

    414 replies

    richardj37254169
    Participating Frequently
    July 24, 2026

    Any plans for HEIF/HEIC format in addition to JPEG?

    richardj37254169
    Participating Frequently
    July 24, 2026

    Loving Pi! Are there any plans to allow different aspect ratios to be selected, 16:9 in particular? 

    Adobe Employee
    July 20, 2026

    Hello everyone,

    Nextcam team today released Project Indigo v1.1.0, which now includes our experimental AI Playground experience, powered by Google’s NanoBanana. We are looking into ways to expose generative AI for image editing and for learning photography, and this is our first such attempt. The experiment is offered for free, but only to a subset of users chosen at random, and while the experiment lasts we will collect analytics data and voluntary feedback from users, both of which will inform our path forward. You can read more about this on our new blog.

    Besides AI Playground, we have also made two other improvements to the app:

    1. We further tuned image quality for iPhone 17-series devices.
    2. We improved the quality of our Remove Reflections ML model while reducing the download size by 4x (now 100MB).

    Please give this new release a spin and if you do get into the AI Playground experience, try it out and let us know what you think.

    Thank you all for your support over the past year (and a month) and we are looking forward to bringing you more improvements and innovation in the future.

     

    Nextcam team

    Known Participant
    July 20, 2026

    Thank you for the update!  Sadly I didn’t not get the AI Playground so I can’t have generate fun using AI.  They update noted denoising and vignetting correction improved, but said may help some scene.  What was done for denosing and what scene did you guys notice the issue previously so I can attempt to replicate since the typical scene I used did not see any improvement at all.

    Participant
    July 17, 2026

    Hi, there's an issue with Burst SR when using it on devices running iOS 27. Specifically, when I try to take a photo, the app just closes and doesn't save the photo. Since Apple has already released the public version of its operating system and a general release is scheduled for early fall, I'm wondering if you're aware of this issue and when we can expect a fix. Thank you. 

    Adobe Employee
    July 20, 2026

    Thank you for reporting this. We will look into it and work with Apple to make sure Project Indigo is ready for the official release of iOS 27.

    Known Participant
    July 14, 2026

    First public beta for iOS 27 is out ​@BorisTheBlade, what have you guys found in regard to the new raw9 and the impact it makes on iPhones using Indigo?

    Known Participant
    July 15, 2026

    Building on this, I think I mentioned having DCG in Indigo being beneficial (if possible) but you never mentioned if that part is accessible from Apple!  ​@BorisTheBlade can the team reach out to apple for this, especially dcg ratio 16 for shadow recovery in extreme hdr scenes.  Everyone in the scene is surprised that the pixel 10 pro series allowed DCG out the box to the white level 4095 in cam2 readout.  The chinese oem vivo x300 ultra also allows DCG to third party via sensormodes.

    Adobe Employee
    July 20, 2026

    We did discuss DCG before - this is not something Apple is supporting, and whether they ever will is unknown to us.

    davidwarner11t
    Participating Frequently
    July 13, 2026

    I'll give it a try and share detailed feedback with sample images if I find any issues. Looking forward to seeing how it performs compared to the stock iPhone camera.

    Known Participant
    July 8, 2026

    Happy 1 year to the team on this project.  Is there any update on the progress ​@BorisTheBlade , and could we see any release soon for the 1 year celebration? :)

    Participating Frequently
    July 9, 2026

    I made an ios camera app which takes a burst of 2-8 dngs 12mp and produces a 48mp dng using google super res zoom like algorithm and works on front and uw camera as well

    Known Participant
    July 9, 2026

    what app would that be?  Is it on the app store yet?

    Participating Frequently
    June 30, 2026

    It’s now one year for Project Indigo. Congrats. After fevering for it basically from day one on, I recently was finally able to experience it on a friends iPhone. It was nice, but will there be a time where I can use it on my own android device?

    Would be really glad about a status update.

    Adobe Employee
    July 6, 2026

    Thank you for reaching out Toni. We are not yet able to commit to an Android version, since the ecosystem is fragmented: we require access to low-level camera APIs, and many OEMs provide their own SDKs for that instead of the standard camera2 from Google. This remains high on our wishlist though, and we’ll jump on it as soon as we are able to.

    Participating Frequently
    July 6, 2026

    @BorisTheBlade Any progress on the SR misalignments and motion artifacts?

    Adobe Employee
    June 10, 2026

    Hello everyone - Project Indigo team is glad to announce Indigo version 1.0.13 release for all supported devices. The biggest news in this release is a new Tech Preview feature called Face Dewarp which corrects for warped faces near the edges of images captured with wide angle lenses. The feature works in two modes (computed simultaneously): one for just faces, and one for all parts of people visible in the image. Depending on the photograph you took, one or the other may be better suited to your needs. It works on both JPEG and DNG files, and as a result saves a JPEG. Please let us know what you think. Eventually the goal will be to enable this on all captures with wide angle lenses automatically, particularly for selfies.

    Project Indigo team will continue working on improving the app, including image quality, stability, performance, and overall usability. Please stay tuned for more, and thank you for your continued support!

    eastlaker
    Participant
    June 15, 2026

    I infer from the above that I can use Face Dewarp on photos that I took with the built-in iPhone camera app. But when I navigate to one of them in the filmstrip in Indigo, the little flask icon at the bottom (to access Tech Previews) isn’t available. The flask icon is functional when I’m viewing a photo taken with Indigo. Is this By Design or a bug?

    Adobe Employee
    June 18, 2026

    This is by design, for the time being. We will work on expanding it to all photos in the future.

    Known Participant
    June 10, 2026

    @BorisTheBlade it looks like iOS 27 came with some incredible tidbits for developers, especially this: https://petapixel.com/2026/06/10/apples-raw-processing-is-finally-evolving-after-a-decade-and-its-a-big-deal/ .  I think this is a tremendous ordeal, especially when dealing with bayer raw and proRAW now (yes I know adobe has it's own AI NR) but this is a game changer imo for one single flow app wouldn’t you think?  Will this be a top priority for Indigo once iOS 27 rolls out (also beta if you guys have access to start working to Indigo), and be implemented?

    Adobe Employee
    June 10, 2026

    Yes, we are aware of Apple’s announcements, and will work with them on testing new features as early as possible. We will look into Core Image RAW 9 and see whether it is in any way applicable to our use-cases or not. Thank you for the pointer.