Adobe Just Launched A New Camera App: Meet Project Indigo

Let’s play How Many Times Has It Happened?

How many times has it happened that you want to click a photo of a beautiful sunset or majestic beach, but the lighting isn’t good?

How many times has it happened that you want to click a photo of an eye-catching object, but it’s just too far away?

How many times has it happened that you want to click a photo of a special person, but the person keeps rejecting all the images you click because they’re simply “not good enough?”

#IYKYK

If only there was a magical mobile application that could eradicate such hurdles! What if there was?

It’s not magic, like we saw in the world of Harry Potter, but it’s nothing short of sorcery.

We’re talking about Adobe’s Project Indigo, of course. It’s Adobe’s new camera app that aims to revolutionize the photography industry—at least for mobile phones.

What’s so special about it, you ask?

Quite a bit, actually—and we’re going to go on an adventure to learn more about it. Don’t miss this one; it’s going to be interspersed with photos taken by the Adobe team testing the app—and headers in the style of Harry Potter titles.
 

Adobe And Its Project Indigo

Adobe is known for its wide range of software applications spanning photo manipulation platforms, web design tools, and vector creation platforms, among others.

In fact, Adobe’s Photoshop is synonymous with photo editing and manipulation and is used interchangeably for the technology it offers. Kind of like Xerox, Google, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, Velcro, Frisbee, and others.

“I’ll just photoshop the background!”

Its latest photo-revolutionizer tool may soon become the new slang term for mobile phone photography.

“I’ll just Indigo the photo!”


“Project Indigo is an experimental camera app developed by Adobe's Nextcam team,” as per the project’s dedicated web page. It’s a newly launched camera app that’s currently available only on the App Store for iPhone. Project Indigo aims to evolve mobile phone photography and address key gaps that remain in its quality.

While phone cameras have been getting better thanks to improvements made in hardware—sensitive imaging chips, higher-quality lenses, and powerful processors—and software—processor programmability, a competitive market, and a vibrant research community, they are unable to compete with big, professional cameras in diverse environments.

“To photograph wildlife you still need a long telephoto lens, and to capture fast-moving sports, where freezing the action requires capturing it in a single frame, you need an imaging chip with large, sensitive pixels,” says Adobe.

Furthermore, smartphones deliver variably different looks, offer limited control, and play keep-away with raw formats—capabilities that professional cameras possess.


Project Indigo overcomes these shortcomings by enabling full manual controls, a more natural (“SLR-like”) look, and photos in JPEG and raw formats, as well as new experiences. It also delivers the highest image quality that computational photography can provide.

What is computational photography, you ask? It’s the use of two strategies: First, under-exposing clicks to reduce the clipping of highlights, and second: capture multiple images in rapid succession per click. These images are then combined to reduce noise in the shadows.

Project Indigo takes this strategy further by under-exposing photos more than usual and combining more frames for each photo, reaching up to 32 frames per photo.

It takes slightly longer to click a picture—mere seconds more—but the result is so much better.

See for yourself!


Additionally, Project Indigo comes with a host of amazing features. Scroll on to learn more about them!
 

Project Indigo And Its Super-Cool Features

Aside from providing users with high-resolution and enhanced photos, Project Indigo offers them some sweet features to further enhance their experience.
 

• Natural Look

  To preserve a natural look without distorting the original scene, Project Indigo uses mild tone mapping—slightly darkening highlights and brightening shadows. Tone mapping can be applied globally (uniformly) or locally (selectively applied to the background, midground, and subject). This is done to ensure dynamic photos are displayed well on phone screens.

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  While local tone mapping improves visibility in complex scenes, it poses editing challenges, especially in heavily processed images where shadows and highlights across unrelated areas may share similar pixel values, leading to an unnatural look. Add to this aggressive brightening, saturation, smoothing, sharpening, and AI-powered edits such as face lightening, skin smoothening, or sky enhancements, and the original look is lost.
  
  Indigo’s mild tone mapping, color saturation boosts, sharpening, and semantically aware adjustments allow it to avoid this, providing a more natural, DSLR-like aesthetic that’s compatible with Adobe tools such as Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.

• Indigo X Lightroom

  Talking about compatibility with Adobe’s wide range of tools, Project Indigo has been built from scratch to work well with Adobe's photography ecosystem. Users can launch the Lightroom mobile app (if installed) for immediate editing by the touch of a button. Where users have the raw format of a photo—DNG (Digital Negative), a raw image file format developed by Adobe—the app will open that.

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  For users that have both installed, Lightroom will suggest opening Indigo’s camera to take pictures.

• Capture Modes

  Indigo comes with two photo modes—Photo and Night. The default mode upon launch is Photo, but the app will suggest using Night mode if it’s dark. Night mode uses longer exposure times and combines 32 frames if it’s extremely dark, and the app detects the phone is on a tripod.

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  Photo mode comes with zero shutter lag, meaning that it captures raw images while the viewfinder is running, and the last image captured before the button is pressed is used as the "reference image" for merging already captured bursts.

• Multi-Frame Super-Resolution

  We didn’t give this feature a superhero name; Adobe did.
  
  Users that pinch-zoom 2× or more on the main lens or 10× or more on the telephoto lens on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, will be treated to Indigo’s multi-frame super-resolution. This restores the lost quality of digital scaling by capturing multiple images of the scene to reduce noise, piggybacking on the users’ natural handshake to capture different viewpoints for each image.

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  These are then combined to produce a single photo with more detail than is present in a single image.

• Pro Controls

  Indigo offers users basic controls such as focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, white balance, temperature, and tint, as well as elaborate controls such as number of frames in bursts. It also comes with a “Long Exposure” button, which when enabled replaces Adobe’s robust merging method, avoiding ghosts or double images in handheld shots.

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  Now, let’s have a look at what’s under the hood, shall we?

 

Project Indigo And Its Technical Details

Indigo’s DNG output preserves the main benefits of raw imagery—pixels aren’t tone-mapped and offer more dynamic range than the pixels in JPEGs, offering 16 bits for red, green, and blue, instead of 8.


Adobe’s DNG aligns and merges multiple frames before creating a DNG, resulting in a higher dynamic range and lower noise. It also stores data before demosaicking (1 color per pixel), making the files smaller than Apple’s ProRAW, with no loss in quality, and preservation of more natural textures.

Indigo’s AI produces two looks—standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR), both stored in JPEG, using a new hybrid SDR/HDR format that has been adopted by Adobe, Apple, Google, Meta, and many others. The JPEG contains a standard SDR image plus a gain map to render HDR on supported screens.

However, it shows the HDR version by default, with a long press revealing the SDR. With that, let’s explore the people behind the app.
 

Project Indigo And Its Developers And Photographers

Adobe made it a point to credit Project Indigo’s development team, as well as credit the people behind the mesmeric photographs taken.

The app was developed by Adobe's Nextcam team, where the contributors included Jiawen (Kevin) Chen, Zhoutong Zhang, Yuting Yang, Richard Case, Shumian Xin, Ke Wang, Eric Kee, Adam Pikielny, Ilya Chugunov, Cecilia Zhang, Zhihao Xia, Louise Huang, Lars Jebe, Haiting Lin, Lantao Yu, Florian Kainz, Mohammad Haque, Boris Ajdin, and Marc Levoy.

The photographs featured in the blog were clicked by Marc Levoy, Florian Kainz, Sophia Kainz, Adam Pikielny, and Lars Jebe.


You can check out all the photos uploaded by Adobe’s team here.
 

Adobe And Its Future Plans

In addition to being a totally rad camera app, Adobe’s Project Indigo also acts as a platform to test and display technologies that may eventually be deployed in Adobe’s flagship products. This is why Adobe is looking for feedback from users on the project.

This project also marks the beginning of a journey towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience. The plan is that the app will be used by amateur and casual photographers who want SLR-like looks when viewing images on large screens, as well as professional photographers who want more manual controls.


This is the reason behind releasing Project Indigo for free to iPhone users, with an Android version coming soon.

Furthermore, Adobe plans to add portrait mode, panorama, video recording, exposure bracketing, focus bracketing, and several multi-frame modes.

Project Indigo adds to Adobe’s Removing Reflections, which remove reflections or focus on reflections immediately after capture, and Project Violet, which is a high performance, iOS-native video editing app.


Pretty magical, right?
 

Conclusion

While we’re still quite a few wand-waves away from wizarding world portraits that blink and stroll off the frame, Adobe’s Project Indigo brings photographic magic of another kind. Whether you’re an amateur with a love for sunsets, a perfectionist who takes 77 shots to get one good selfie, or a pro chasing that elusive dynamic range, Indigo might just be your new favorite spell.

So, are you ready to Indigo your memories?