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. Also with new controls for computational cameras and a glimpse into the future of AI image processing on our Tech Previews page.
Available for iPhone 12 and 13 Pro/Pro Max, and all 14, 15, 16, or 17-series devices, and initial support for iPads.
For best experience we recommend using iPhone 15 Pro or newer.
A COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY CAMERA
Instead of capturing a single photo, for every shutter press Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range.
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, 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" with infinite number of frames where the camera captures and merges images until stopped.
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. ‘SR’ indicator on the zoom buttons shows when it is active.
MACRO MODE
Enable Macro from the viewfinder and capture stunning close-up shots.
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 in a slightly different form.
AI DENOISE
One such technology is a variant of the AI-based denoising 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 reflections when shooting through plate glass windows that cover most of the camera field of view.
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
A refreshing take on computational photography
StereoSunshine
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
Much better than native iPhone app
Ls154
I primarily use my phone for wide shots (landscapes, sunrises) and sometimes for macros. The good/great:1) It gets rid of that ring around the rising sun, at least mostly and much better than the native iPhone app.2) Much better in high contrast situations (like sunrise).3) Nothing is lost when importing to Lightroom and exporting from there, unlike the native app.4) Takes excellent macro shots when it allows you to switch to macro mode - at least as good as the native app. 5) no need for additional hardware or extra lenses!The challenges:1) It's a litlte glitchy and it's frozen on me twice.2) If you change a manual setting, such as exposure, but then you close the manual settings bar it goes fully into auto mode. I usually set my exposure to +1. In the native app, everything I take from then on is +1. In Project Indigo, this is only true if I leave hte manual controls open. If I hide them, it is no longer at +1. Where this gets a little awkward is that if you have the manual controls open, it won't give you the option to switch into macro mode and there is no way to manually switch. You have to close the manual controls, let it prompt you, switch to macro mode and then reopen the manual controls. It's no big deal really, but hopefully something they may fix in the future.
Developer Response
Hi there, thank you for trying Project Indigo and for sharing feedback. We are very happy to hear you are enjoying your photography with Indigo. The team is working hard on improvements to the app, and we will be sharing them shortly. Please stay tuned. Regarding the challenges you mentioned, we hear you on the app being glitchy - performance and stability are our top priorities, and we hope that the improvements we will be rolling out make your experience better and more reliable. Regarding exposure compensation, we will add it to Auto mode in one of the upcoming updates, which should make using it easier for regular everyday use. And to make Macro mode more useful, we will enable users to turn Macro on and off themselves without waiting for the app to suggest it. Lots of exciting updates are on the horizon! ^RS
Natural look with smartphone style convenience
Mr. DHW
The most used camera app on my phone. Finally can get photos out of the iPhone that don’t look out of place next to pictures taken with a traditional camera, while retaining the smartphone style convenience of computational photography. Full manual controls and “raw” sensor modes in other apps sometimes works, but is high effort and leaves the computational strengths of the iPhone to overcome the small sensor size completely unutilized. This app gets really close, sometimes better than images obtained with the Sony Xperia Pro-i, which has a traditional 1 inch type sensor and Sony alpha image processing. Until this app, the Sony was my favorite smartphone photography experience. Even on an iPhone 16e with a much smaller sensor, it’s been very stable and consistent. Makes me excited to take pictures with my iPhone again!
Developer Response
Hello there! Thank you for trying Project Indigo and for sharing feedback. We are very happy to hear Indigo has made you excited to photograph with an iPhone! Indigo is still in experimental stage, so we will continue improving the app performance and stability as our number 1 priorities. But we have additional app and UI improvements lined up, and cannot wait to have them tested by our users. Next update is coming up in a few weeks - please stay tuned. ^RC
New features:
- New grid view in the filmstrip. Find your photos more easily. Includes multi-selection for sharing or deletion.
- Use the multi-selection feature in the grid view to import multiple photos into the Lightroom mobile app in one go.
- Filtering of photos in the filmstrip and grid. Select between All Photos, Indigo Album, and Favorites.
- New option to display the 35mm equivalent focal length for rear cameras. Enable in Capture settings.
- Support added for iPhone 17e devices.
Initial iPad support
- Indigo now runs on iPads with at least 6GB of RAM. Note: Project Indigo is not yet tuned for iPad operation. For optimal experience use Project Indigo on an eligible iPhone device.
Bug fixes and improvements:
- Improved overall app stability with a completely reimplemented camera session. You should experience fewer crashes, delays, or hiccups.
- Updated noise and vignetting correction tuning for iPhone 17-series devices.
- Fixed an issue with black Indigo DNG thumbnails when viewed on a Mac.
- Capped exposure time during viewfinding in Night mode for a more responsive viewfinder experience.
- Fixed an issue where overexposed viewfinder was appearing on resuming the app if the app was backgrounded in Night mode with long exposure times.
- Tuned tap-to-focus behavior should help improve focus quality when tapping on small objects when the camera is zoomed in.
- Fixed a bug with vignetting correction for images utilizing the multi-image super-resolution.
- Intra-frame gaps for the Long Exposure feature are now consistent, allowing for better capture of things like light trails.
- Viewfinder video stream is now running at 4K (up from 2K) for a better preview experience when using pinch-to-zoom. It also improves focus loupe sharpness.
- Fixed an occasional bug where capturing photos in rapid succession resulted in two of the photos being identical.
- Fixed a temporary app freeze which may happen occasionally.
- Optimized Auto Exposure computation speed
Known issues:
- In Night mode, when switching quickly from very dark to very bright scenes, the app may get stuck with an overexposed viewfinder for some time. It will converge after a few seconds.
Version 1.0.11
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
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
