P: Introducing the Project Indigo camera app

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 23, 2025
1361 replies
245659 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:

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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!

MilanJovic

Participant

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

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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?

richardj37254169

Participating Frequently

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

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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:

We further tuned image quality for iPhone 17-series devices.
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

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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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Vladoskokos

Participant

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

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?

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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

davidwarner11t

Participating Frequently

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.

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

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? :)

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powerful_Elixir5E29

Participating Frequently

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

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nhan_8084

Known Participant

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

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toni_0822

Participating Frequently

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.

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BorisTheBlade

Adobe Employee

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.