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30

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Adobe Employee ,
May 23, 2025 May 23, 2025

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: 

 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
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iOS: iPhone
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replies 695 Replies 695
Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade Will indigo's future updates support iphone 11,12,13 which are now limited due to their RAM? If not then how does the same algorithm which Marc developed for google - HDR+ work on even low-end android phones?


By @powerful_Elixir5E29

Indigo requires a lot more memory because we are, for now, more interested in developing and testing cutting edge computational photography than we are in supporting older and older device - it is an experimental app, after all. We can reduce the amount of compute we do if the devices are less powerful and enable them to run Indigo, but that is less important for the time being.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention a bug with Indigo and saw it again last night to remind me.  I was using a led headlight last night to do some yard work and used Indigo to shoot some picture.  This was late about 11 pm so I used the headlight to see, when Indigo was running it looks like the headlight caused some interference with the app as it was displaying vertical scrolling bands, like refresh rate bands.  The bands are also captured in the picture as lines/bands.  I noticed that this behavior also happened back in July when I had a magsafe battery bank 5000mAh attached while running Indigo, it showed banding across the viewfinder and also capturing had those bandings.

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention a bug with Indigo and saw it again last night to remind me.  I was using a led headlight last night to do some yard work and used Indigo to shoot some picture.  This was late about 11 pm so I used the headlight to see, when Indigo was running it looks like the headlight caused some interference with the app as it was displaying vertical scrolling bands, like refresh rate bands.  The bands are also captured in the picture as lines/bands.  I noticed that this behavior also happened back in July when I had a magsafe battery bank 5000mAh attached while running Indigo, it showed banding across the viewfinder and also capturing had those bandings.


By @nhan_8084

This is LED banding - depending on the light flicker frequency, it may cause such lines (i.e., bands) to appear in the image. We'll look into how to improve the app in presence of flickering light sources.

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Explorer ,
Aug 26, 2025 Aug 26, 2025

@BorisTheBlade I forgot to mention banding do not happen in stock app on both the magsafe battery nor the LED headlight, but Indigo both occured.

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Explorer ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025

Also this one regarding banding @BorisTheBlade 

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025
quote

Also this one regarding banding @BorisTheBlade 


By @nhan_8084

Reliably detecting banding live is not easy. We'll look into it, but whatever we do is likely to increase the power consumption of the app, so we'll prioritize app performance and stability optimization and leave this in the backlog for now. FWIW, Apple is probably using a function of their ISP to detect banding, which would make it very power-efficient to use. Unfortunately, it is not exposed to 3rd pary apps.

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Explorer ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025

@BorisTheBlade Thanks for the explanation!  I will let you or the team know if other third party app such as Halide experiences banding with led lights or magsafe powerbank.  If they do not, then perhaps the team can put in a changelog to caution against using led lighting and power banks causes banding, OR if possible, see if it is possible to have single frame raw so no power is consumed vs having computational raw?

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Adobe Employee ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade Thanks for the explanation!  I will let you or the team know if other third party app such as Halide experiences banding with led lights or magsafe powerbank.  If they do not, then perhaps the team can put in a changelog to caution against using led lighting and power banks causes banding, OR if possible, see if it is possible to have single frame raw so no power is consumed vs having computational raw?


By @nhan_8084

The anti-banding in iPhone is tied to using Apple's auto-exposure algorithm. If a 3rd party app usses Apple's AE, then anti-banding is probably available. Indigo is developing a custom AE since Apple's exposure tends to be higher than what we like, and because of that anti-banding function is not available.

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Explorer ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025

@BorisTheBlade yes stock camera app does tend to go on the bright side, however apple's stock is bit better than other stock androids I've seen and used personally.  They are quite on point with exposure level, in hdr scenes I noticed indigo has issues with trying to wb the scene while adjust for exposure.  I took a scene in a hotel and will try to post to show.  Hopefully the team can figure out if it's possible to make the best for anti-banding without apple's AE.

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 28, 2025 Aug 28, 2025

Hello everyone - Project Indigo team would like to thank all who are visiting this forum, sharing their experiences, and helping us work on improving the app. We are aware that it has been a while since the last update. The next release is very much in progress and is scheduled to go live in the next 3 weeks, so stay tuned. We are a small team, but we are working very hard to add improvements to the app. Since Indigo uses a custom image processing pipeline, some improvements may take longer then one would anticipate, since we are not able to just call an Apple API and expose some new functonality: we often have to build it from scratch.

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Community Beginner ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025

@BorisTheBlade Will this update primarily be bug fixes and performance improvements?

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 29, 2025 Aug 29, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade Will this update primarily be bug fixes and performance improvements?


By @????????_4983

We are working on adding some user-requested features, such as DNG-only capture. While that sounds easy, in reality it is a bit tricky to do with the right experience. There will also be selfie mirroring, a far easier thing to add. A lot of improvements are under-the-hood as performance and stability are still our number 1 priorities.

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Explorer ,
Aug 31, 2025 Aug 31, 2025

@BorisTheBlade Took some very low lighting shot in main and tele.  I will attach tele raw, sooc jpeg, and processed raw.  It seems like to me hdr isn't very good on both when dealing with led like street lamps and led signs on buildings and cars.  Is it possible for the team to work more on this in jpeg and raw?

 

 If you noticed there are some artifacts in the edges in the tele sample I sent, it seems like vignette correction issues?  There are noises but the noises are very weird, either vignetting correction issues or noise models issues.  Also, the processed jpeg I did in terms of noise reduction to sharpness is how I like sooc jpg to be at.

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3lmut71cuvpiwul6vugxo/IMG_9812.dng?rlkey=vjij72aqh6z6r0ult1b3fdmd9&st...

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Explorer ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025

@BorisTheBlade did you and the team had a chance to look at this sample yet?

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Explorer ,
Sep 01, 2025 Sep 01, 2025

@BorisTheBlade I took a 5x shot, handheld, as stable with two hands as I could, seems like OIS/EIS is def not as good with the tele as the main.  Is it possible to fix?

another note, 5x has a lot of artifacts similar to stock google camera, weird chroma blotching that is due to improper noise models used.  If I use a custom noise model profile it fixes it in google camera, but I do not know how to even go about that for Indigo.  See attached crops for areas of artifacts.

 

raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mj9f1or4izxvmbkxd2q73/IMG_9970.dng?rlkey=t7t9kf01gf7wlaq13320uf7a2&st...

 

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Adobe Employee ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade I took a 5x shot, handheld, as stable with two hands as I could, seems like OIS/EIS is def not as good with the tele as the main.  Is it possible to fix?

another note, 5x has a lot of artifacts similar to stock google camera, weird chroma blotching that is due to improper noise models used.  If I use a custom noise model profile it fixes it in google camera, but I do not know how to even go about that for Indigo.  See attached crops for areas of artifacts.


By @nhan_8084

Thank you for sharing. On the stability of the 5x shot, did you use Photo or Night mode? If you used Photo mode then there is no OIS, as that is only available in the Night mode. Furthermore, 3rd parties have no ways to influence the OIS: it works as it works and is not tunable. In either mode EIS is used only for stabilization of the viewfinder, but the processing later "stabilizes" implicitly by using aligning & merging of the frames. We'll keep tuning those algorithms.

Regarding noise, we are updating the noise calibration for all lenses on all supported devices. It's still TBD how much impact that will have on the results.

Overall, note that 5x camera is a much poorer performer than the 1x, which is why Apple is under-the-hood often silently switching from 5x to 1x to improve image quality, for example in low light situations.

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Explorer ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025

@BorisTheBlade That shot was using non night as it's bright day.  Should I use night mode regardless to use the algorithm for align and proper merge?  I didn't know those artifacts were caused from improper merge and alignment!  As mentioned, those artifacts are fixed by using custom noise model values when I use google camera mod apk version on Pixels and non-pixel devices.  Glad to hear noise profiles are being improved upon.

 

In regard to the 5x switching to the 1x crop, yes all OEM does that unless you force it in pro modes typically since main has faster aperature and bigger sensor.  Although I have had good experience with apple's stock camera not switching to main unless it's extremely low lit scene, but then again who uses tele at those scenes!

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Adobe Employee ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025
quote

@BorisTheBlade That shot was using non night as it's bright day.  Should I use night mode regardless to use the algorithm for align and proper merge?  I didn't know those artifacts were caused from improper merge and alignment!  As mentioned, those artifacts are fixed by using custom noise model values when I use google camera mod apk version on Pixels and non-pixel devices.  Glad to hear noise profiles are being improved upon.

 

In regard to the 5x switching to the 1x crop, yes all OEM does that unless you force it in pro modes typically since main has faster aperature and bigger sensor.  Although I have had good experience with apple's stock camera not switching to main unless it's extremely low lit scene, but then again who uses tele at those scenes!


By @nhan_8084

The only reason I asked whether it was Photo or Night mode is because of OIS - Photo mode doesn't have it and Night mode does. This is a challenging scene because the singer and much of the stage are shaded while some of the scene is directly lit by the sun and very bright. Looking at the results, there are a few possible reasons why it didn't end up as good: 5x camera quality, exposure chosen by Indigo AE may be too low, noise may need to be better managed, etc. I suspect that for a scene like this we need an HDR align & merge which uses bracketed frames and merges them, rather than using the same exposure as the current algorithm does. We are working on that, but it will take some time.

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Explorer ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025

@BorisTheBlade I did remember you mentioned expo bracketing in the works and that will be amazing, similar to what pixel is doing for the 9 series (low middle and high) which hopefully will solve issues with led objects hdr such as street lamps, led signs of all sorts!  Currently I noticed only recoverable HDR scenes (high light slider to the left -100 in lrm) are either clouds or some window scenes, but led objects mentioned are not recoverable at all.

 

Side note: is there a possibility to do lossless dng compression like on the pixels gcam?  I find it very space hogging after processing dng to jpeg, they all get around 20mb range for a jpeg!  I was hoping for half of that since it's only 12mp raws like in google camera dng to jpeg.  I think compression for jpeg is 95% and raw was lossless compression in google camera.

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Explorer ,
Sep 02, 2025 Sep 02, 2025

Came across this reddit thread on how Pixel 9 series does zooms @BorisTheBlade : https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1flk1ia/indepth_analysis_of_the_9_pro_camera_at_variou... 

This was somewhat of what I was trying to ask of Indigo's team regarding to applying SR at various zooms.  Please take a look and see if it's even possible for iPhones going forward.

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Explorer ,
12 hours ago 12 hours ago
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@BorisTheBlade Last night I took a night mode Indigo raw for the first time just to see how it does handheld.  Everything was left on auto upon entering night mode.  The result is pretty decent but there are rooms for improvement of course as always.  It took 4s animation based on the counter to do it's merge and process.  In lightroom mobile, it's quite amazing to push the shadow up about the midpoint of the slider before you get any strange artifacts.  Pushing it to almost max gives weird chroma noise/blobs/ whatever you call it in the shadows/black areas.  I do not know what is the cause of this or to even call it.  But as you see the noise patterns are fine grains elsewhere, which is fine, can the shadows/black areas be this fine grains in the future vs whatever it is now shown?  I have attached the crops as well as the raw.

 

I spoke to you before in regards to having always DCG on for whatever sensor is capable of in the 15 pro series and upwards since the sensor "should" be capable of dual conversion gain.  I have attached two example of a extremely hard case shot inside a restaurant with hdr.  One shot is taken with DCG enabled raw from google camera 9.6 with my own tuning adjustments for google camera, and one shot is from Indigo raw.  All was auto.  As you can see the dcg raw from google camera is far better in terms of shadow noise recovery vs the normal raw.  Having DCG on always will also aid in the night shot mentioned above as well.  Let me know what you think after digressing into these raw samples.

 

Dcg raw from google camera 9.6 mods: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vimbaizmsqfetaa8dgtd3/Gcam9.6_DCG.dng?rlkey=3spypsi70zm2sbkwqiti0tzq2...

 

Indigo raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ueva2i4mcbz6nq6vqe49k/IMG_9994.dng?rlkey=sybu0e3vyy1r1zc2p94zalzwz&st...

 

Indigo Nightmode raw: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2vio2d1pqb849j28gh95l/IMG_9993.dng?rlkey=yllxxfoscrjkm5qt8kublcv0p&st...

 

 

 

 

 

 

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