Project Indigo

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.

Bug fixes and improvements:
- Fixed an issue where a developed JPEG was not included in the Indigo album.
- Fixed an issue where a JPEG computed by Tech Preview features was not included in the Indigo album.
- Removed the Macro mode button when the device only has one camera lens (for example, iPhone 17 Air).
- Removed the EIS toggle from the app Settings.
- Fixed an issue with captures with BurstSR active occasionally getting lost during app transition from foreground to background.
- Fixed an issue with swiping down in Grid view with the image Info panel open causing the UI to become unresponsive.
- Improved first run experience with better placing of the first ‘Image processing’ tip in the UI.
- iPad only: fixed a crash when sharing directly from Indigo.
- iPads with M5 chip can now run Indigo.