P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 23, 2025
1382 replies
246763 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 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:

M

Melodic_coder7f97

Hello guys at adobe mainly project indigo

I just love the app its soo easy and great to use and colors that it produces looks insanely good on my friends 16pm and thats where the issue arises

Could you guys pleaseee make a port for android

Last year there were rumours and maybe even confirmation of it but isnt it time for an android release?

Thank you everyone for making this app its genuinely one of if not the best camera apps on ios and hopefully we will get it on android soon

H

helpful_Fluttera42c

Participant

Very excited about this app. But why is there an aspect ratio selection menu if (according to Copilot anyway) the app controls this and there is no control available to the user? Even when I select 1:1 te screen shows me 4:3.

How does the app cope with a situation where either the camera or subject (or maybe both) are moving? Asking re the app feature of combining multiple exposures. Seems like there are occasions when one might not want that. What mechanism controls how many exposures are made?

Thanks to Adobe for making this app. Looking forward to learning more, I hope they keep the UI clean and don’t fall into the low-contrast trap. A UI needs to be readable. This one is. Looking forward to uture developments.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Apologies for this confusion - we are indeed working on aspect ratio support, but it was not supposed to be shipped yet as it is not ready. We will remove it from the next version and then ship again once it is completed.

Regarding your question about merging exposures, the app is doing its best to determine how many frames to merge, which exposure time to use, and when merging, avoid creating artifacts or blurring the result. As everything, there are limits to how good all of that can work out of the box. What I would say that Indigo is a tool for photography: it can do some things for you, but like any other tool, it will have limitations. With some experimentation, you can figure out when to trust the tool, vs when to take control over how it works. In this particular example, if you are expecting a severe amount of movement, you may simply want to go to Pro Controls in Night mode and select Frames to merge to 1 (right-most Pro control). As long as the scene is bright light, this will work well: effectively, only one raw frame will be captured and no aligning + merging will be performer. If it is low light scene, then one raw frame won’t be enough since the light gathering capacity of small sensors on mobile devices is much poorer than on large cameras.

K

KonradRodeArt

Participant

Anther option I would love to see: Postponing processing until later. The idea would be to save battery life as this intense processing eats through my battery in no time (iPhone 16e, battery health 100%).

M

Moonboots22

Participating Frequently

I think you can do this but it’s kind of manual. If you capture in Raw only and access the pictures in the Project Indigo film strip, you can run the Raw through the Indigo processing engine at whatever time you choose.

K

KonradRodeArt

Participant

Any chance of an option to save as HEIC instead of JPEG? So, say, save as DNG+HEIC. Thanks for a great app!

M

Moonboots22

Participating Frequently

@boristheblade - After playing with the latest version for a few weeks again, want to bring a few more feature requests to the table for the team.

Adobe color science profiles - the stock JPEG generated through PI is often good, but to have options that process the Raw based on what would be the “auto magic” version of Adobe Color, Adobe Landscape, Adobe Portrait, Adobe Vivid, and Adobe Monochrome in app would be fantastic. This is what I normally end up using if I export the Raw to Lightroom anyway.
Aspect ratios in app. I crop most things to 3:2 or 1:1. Would be great to have the option SOOC.
One more bump for “one click portrait mode”, maybe as a “Labs” feature where AI denoise, reflection removal are. Adobe’s AI lens blur mask is spot on. Having it in app for quick portrait without having to go to Lightroom would be excellent.
Let us go nuts with SuperRes. 24, 36, or 48MP Bayer based images with stacking out of the main lens would be awesome.

Any hints you can drop on upcoming features for us??

R

ruslandavletshin

Participant

I noticed the same thing. It usually happens if you close Indigo before image processing ends.

F

Flawless_Hummingbird9347

Participant

0765 was taken with iPhone 16 Pro, Indigo, inside house through window glass at feeder about 30 feet away. Told AI Playground to enhance bird details which is 0764. In my estimation very impressive results.

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Thank you for the feedback. Presumably, you wanted to attach before/after photos to your post?

F

Flawless_Hummingbird9347

Participant

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Hello folks - Project Indigo team has a question specifically for our users in Japan and Korea. Can you share what kind of sounds do you get from Indigo if you set your device to ‘silent’? Specifically, need to know whether there is an audible sound when:

Starting the viewfinder
Capture start shutter sound
1. Capture end shutter sound (if it is a longer exposure)
File being saved on disk

Thank you!

P

powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

@BorisTheBlade Sorry for the more technical side of my question but how do you fix the aperture problem in you super res algorithm where it would otherwise created shifted object edges?

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

I am not sure I understand your question?

MilanJovic

Participant

Latest version 1.1.1 on 13 pro max gives me this on SR lenses

B

BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

Thank you for reporting this. Presumably you are running iOS 27 beta? If so, we have also reproduced the issue and have shared the feedback with Apple. If you are running iOS 26 or iOS 18, please let me know as that would be unexpected.

Jeff Donald

Participating Frequently

Hi, yes I’m using the beta camera app (0.0.1 build 0.80.2) on ios 27 developer beta 4 (Appleseed release), on iphone 17 PM. I don’t have any blue boxes. The beta seems to be fine on iOS 27.

richardj37254169

Participating Frequently

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

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