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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
May 23, 2025

P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

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. 

 

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: 

 

      1378 replies

      K
      KonradRodeArt
      Participant
      August 23, 2026

      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
      August 25, 2026

      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
      August 23, 2026

      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
      August 22, 2026

      @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. 

       

      1. 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. 
         
      2. Aspect ratios in app. I crop most things to 3:2 or 1:1. Would be great to have the option SOOC. 
      3. 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. 
      4. 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
      August 20, 2026

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

      F
      Flawless_Hummingbird9347
      Participant
      August 6, 2026

      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
      Adobe Employee
      BorisTheBlade
      Adobe Employee
      August 6, 2026

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

      F
      Flawless_Hummingbird9347
      Participant
      August 6, 2026

       

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        August 4, 2026

        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:

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

        Thank you!

        P
        powerful_Elixir5E29
        Participating Frequently
        August 11, 2026

        ​@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
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        August 11, 2026

        I am not sure I understand your question?

        MilanJovic
        MilanJovic
        Participant
        August 1, 2026

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

         

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        Adobe Employee
        August 3, 2026

        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
        Jeff Donald
        Participating Frequently
        August 3, 2026

        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
        richardj37254169
        Participating Frequently
        July 24, 2026

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

        richardj37254169
        richardj37254169
        Participating Frequently
        July 24, 2026

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

        B
        Adobe Employee
        BorisTheBlade
        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

          N
          nhan_8084
          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.

          B
          Adobe Employee
          BorisTheBlade
          Adobe Employee
          July 28, 2026

          Sorry for the delayed response. The change is present in all captures, but will be most noticeable in daytime scene, as well as with high dynamic range content.

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