Project Indigo 4+

A new camera from Adobe Labs

Adobe Labs, Inc.

    • Free

iPhone Screenshots

Description

Welcome to Project Indigo, a new camera experience from Adobe Labs. With a custom computational photography pipeline, a natural image look, and full set of manual camera controls, it offers something for professional and casual photographers alike. In addition, we introduce new controls for computational cameras for the first time and offer a glimpse into the future of AI image processing on our Tech Previews page.

Available for iPhone 12 Pro/Pro Max, 13 Pro/Pro Max, and all iPhones 14 and above.
For optimal experience we recommend using iPhone 15 Pro or newer devices.

A COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY CAMERA

Instead of capturing a single photo, Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range. And all this at the press of a shutter button.

PHOTO MODE VS NIGHT MODE

Photo mode is intended for everyday use in good lighting, and has zero shutter lag, meaning it captures the moment you wanted.

Night mode is intended for use in low light. In this mode images are captured after you press the shutter button (so with some shutter lag), but use longer exposure times, further reducing noise.

NATURAL LOOK

Photos produced by Indigo employ computational photography and AI to produce a natural (SLR-like) look for your photos, including special (but gentle) treatment of subjects and skies. This look is applied when generating JPEG images and is embedded as a rendering suggestion in raw DNG files (if enabled). All raw pixels remain intact – the look does not alter them.

PRO CONTROLS

Using these you can take full control of how Indigo captures the image, manually specifying focus, exposure time and ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance. Focus control includes an optional magnified loupe for setting precise focus, and white balance control allows you to tap on an object known to be neutral gray.

Unique to Indigo’s Night mode is manual control over the number of frames aligned and merged into a final photo. More frames result in lower noise but a longer time to capture a photo. There is also a Long Exposure mode: if the phone is on a tripod, this allows the capture of synthetic long exposure effects like “water-into-silk".

SUPER-RESOLUTION FOR ZOOM

Using pinch-to-zoom in any camera app often results in image quality loss. To recover the image Indigo employs multi-frame super-resolution which can restore much of the lost quality. Look for the ‘SR’ indicator on the zoom buttons to know when it is active.

VIEWFINDER

Indigo’s viewfinder provides a view of the camera parameters that will be used for capture, a live histogram of the scene, zebra striping that shows you where there are over-exposed areas in the image, and a level to help you capture straight images.

LIGHTROOM INTEGRATION

Adobe Lightroom for mobile is the most powerful photo editor in the App Store. Indigo filmstrip allows you to send an image directly to Lightroom mobile app for editing. In addition, our (optional) raw DNG files provide maximum compatibility with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

TECHNOLOGY PREVIEWS

Technology Previews will be a place where we will offer an early look at technologies that may eventually be deployed in Adobe’s flagship products, or that already appear in these products but in a slightly different form.

AI DENOISE

One such technology is a variant of the AI-based denoising technology available in Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It requires raw DNG as input, and it saves a new DNG to your camera roll.

REMOVE REFLECTIONS

Another example is a variant of the AI-based Remove Reflections technology from Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It requires a DNG as input, and it saves a medium-resolution JPEG to your camera roll. The technology is designed to address only one kind of reflection - shooting through plate glass windows that cover most of the camera field of view.

What’s New

Version 1.0.2

- Fixed an issue with multi-frame super-resolution quality in bright and low dynamic range scenes. You should now see increased amounts of detail in these conditions.
- On lower-performing devices, reduce the rate at which users can capture photos, as well as the number of shots that can be queued for processing (iPhone 15/15+ and below). If the shutter grays out on older phones, just wait a few seconds.
- Disabled super-resolution by default on iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max, and iPhone 15/15+ devices. It can be re-enabled in the Settings menu, but may warm up your phone
- Thermal warning is now only shown when the device is in “critical” state. Note that iOS may slow down processing when the device is in “serious” state.
- Disabled Tech Previews while there are pending captures being processed.
- Various other bug fixes and improvements.

Ratings and Reviews

3.6 out of 5
362 Ratings

362 Ratings

Jackssightseeing ,

Love it but some bugs

I’ve been looking for an app like this for a long time and the only options have been paid or kind of garbage. As somebody who already has an Adobe subscription I love this and can’t wait to see how it improves.

Couple of bugs, the overheating warning can’t be exited out of in Landscape mode as the X is blocked by the shutter button. Moderate use on my iPhone 14 leads to over. Hitting the Lightroom button doesn’t immediately open that photo in Lightroom but just brings you to the import page which I feel like is a Missed opportunity for quicker workflow. Additionally it would be nice to be able to go into macro mode without requiring the phone to suggest it first.

Overall great app and I hope I can give it a five out of five soon.

Developer Response ,

Hello there! Thank you so much for the thoughtful and encouraging feedback—we’re thrilled to hear this app is filling a gap you’ve been looking to solve, especially as part of your Adobe workflow. Project Indigo team is aware of reports that the app may trigger heat warning too easily on some devices, making it harder to use. We are working on optimizing the app experience and will be releasing updates that address these issues in the coming weeks. I’ll also pass your feedback to the team about: The overheating warning’s “X” being blocked in landscape mode, The Lightroom button behavior, And the request for direct macro mode access. We truly appreciate your support and hope we can earn that 5/5 from you very soon! ^RC

Logan Darklock ,

Outstanding quality

I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, which isn't the worst camera in the world, but photos from the default camera app or, say, Halide, tend to look a bit punchier than reality. Project Indigo tends to look a lot more balanced in shots that Halide would overrepresent, while still taking extremely pretty and vibrant photos in genuinely saturated environments. It just feels generally a lot more true to life. One of the stated goals of Project Indigo is to make the captured photos look as close as possible to real SLR shots, and while I've personally never used an SLR camera, this certainly looks about up to par with what I'd expect from one. My only gripe is that, like seemingly all third-party camera apps, there is no button to open a photo in the built-in Photos app, nor is there one to open it in the built-in photo editor. There is a button to open the Photos app, but it doesn't take me to the specific photo I was viewing.

Developer Response ,

Hi Logan!Thank you for trying Project Indigo and for sharing feedback. The team is very happy to hear you are enjoying your photography with Indigo. We will continue optimizing the app performance and increasing stability while adding new features and improving the user experience. Regarding viewing and editing photos captured with Indigo, we are focusing on the raw capture and editing. Indigo raw DNGs contain the raw pixels captured by the camera, but also the post-processing "look" embedded into the DNG, which at present only Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom read and render properly. This "look" matches our JPEG look and intends to provide a good starting point for further editing. Without this look, one can still safely edit the raw DNG image, but it takes a lot more work to achieve good results. We'd like to hear more about your workflow and see how we can improve Indigo to enable it. Please feel free to reach out to the team on the app's forum (accessible via the App Support button on the App Store page) and share more details about your process. ^RS

StereoSunshine ,

A refreshing take on computational photography

As someone who is a smartphone photography enthusiast, I always lamented that, despite improvements in smartphone cameras, you could always immediately tell if a photo was from a phone and not an ILC. This app bridges the gap quite a bit. You won’t get the fidelity and pixel peeping ability of photos from bigger cameras, but you will very often get natural looking photos.

I’m satisfied with the super resolution feature—it’s a step above the native camera app’s digital zoom. The manual controls are also sufficient. I don’t use them often, but they’re there. For example, if you manually focus, the viewfinder will show a zoomed in view so you can get the focus you want easily.

Something to note is that this app is pretty computationally intense. Photos take a few seconds to process, and you may experience some stuttering if the phone is on low power mode.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thank you for trying Project Indigo and for sharing your impressions. We are happy you are enjoying your experience so far. The team is hard at work to make improvements, especially on the performance side, and we hope they will make the use of the app even more enjoyable. ^RS

App Privacy

The developer, Adobe Labs, Inc., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Location
  • Identifiers
  • Usage Data

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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