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: 

[nhan_8084]

I took a selfie and looked at the exif of Indigo vs stock, both jpeg, and Indigo's 23mm vs stock 20mm at the widest.  Is there a reason why Indigo crops into selfie since Apple's whole new square sensor is about wider fov and being able to do horizontal selfies without rotating the phone?  The image quality of Indigo's selfie jpeg is EXCELLENT vs the stock output that is noisy and oversharpened.  I am very satisfied with the way that the selfie has done on this new sensor, it's a tad soft, but I'm not sure because of the denoising, but if the team can dial that denoising down 25% it should be literally perfect.  I havent test any HDR on selfies yet so I will report that later.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade Here is a couple of set shots in same area as I showed before when I had my 15 Pro Max.  All shots were done in auto normal mode as is, no settings changed, and stock are same.  No night mode used at all in stock or Indigo.  Lighting to me are quite bright due to the lightings all over so I wouldn't call this low lighting.

The 1x does very well, slight loss in brick details but the dng is fine with sharpening and denoising nuked vs default values in the dng using light room mobile. I will post comparison of the SOOC jpeg of Indigo vs stock as is, then crops of a detail brick area of a building of SOOC dng of Indigo vs nuked sharpening and all denoise vs SOOC jpeg Indigo.

The next set is of using periscope 4x, all shots auto from Indigo and stock, nothing else touched or modified.  Indigo's jpeg and dng are extremely denoised somehow to the point that brick details are completely lost.  Even the dng nuked denoising cannot recover it.  It's like some weird gaussian blur.  Stock has brick details, just with the obvious sharpening but the brick details show actual rectangular bricks vs literally nothing in Indigo!  Crops will show what I am referring to.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade I had to split to two parts since it only allows 10 attachments.  Also I noticed that Indigo doesn't have wysiwyg?  The viewfinder is more true to life exposure while the output jpeg is much darker.  This happens especially during scenes at night, or if the light portion is not in frame.  I believed Oliver mentioned this as well.

[nhan_8084]

@BorisTheBlade This set is using 4x and 8x SR of Indigo vs stock, all auto, just point and shoot.  I took these images to show daytime lighting with grey clouds on a wet rainy day.

The 4x dng handled VERY WELL, the jpeg is a different story.  As you can see vs stock jpeg, Indigo's jpeg do not have the organic fine details of the pine tree as the stock jpeg, it is smeared into a bush like blob.  The dng as is imported in lightroom mobile is MUCH better than the Indigo jpeg, so maybe make that the default jpeg output because it is already in the dng as default render.  I will include crops to show point of interest.

-1251 png is crop of 4x SOOC Indigo jpeg

-1250 png is the crop of dng untouched as soon as it gets imported to lightroom mobile.  This is the one I said to make this rendering default to the SOOC Indigo Jpeg because it looks fine to me vs the 1251 rendering!

-1248 png is the crop of dng with all sharpening and noise reduction nuked, my preferred rendering if I was to apply it to become the SOCC Indigo jpeg.  It is much more organic looking, no loss of colors because color noise reduction is nuked.

The second set is of 8x SR, and it completely went left field!  There is no fine details of any sort, everything on the tree is plastic, oily, smears, as well as other surrounding plant branches and foliages.  The dng definitely do not help either from the jpeg, unlike the 4x counterpart.  I have tuned similar size sensor at 1/2.55" JN1 at f/2.6 and worse from android phones using google camera mod at same distance and scene lightings, and pine trees rendered much better at 10x to 30x range even.  From my time tuning gcam, I find that the main cause for improper rendering points to wrong noise model factor used for each lenses as they all require separate noise model values.  
-1247 png is the crop of the 8x dng as is imported to light room mobile, and as you can see it's plastic and smearing all over.

-1246 png is the crop of the 8x dng with sharpening and noise reduction nuked, no difference or no improvements I should say.

Oversaturation is still an issue as well.  I hope this explains everything I intend to show.  Please ask any questions as I am very very serious in analyzing and helping Indigo as I have my fair share of experiences with tuning on google camera.