Selfie Redemption: Adobe's Project Indigo Finally Fully Supports iPhone 17 Front Camera
For fans of Adobe's Project Indigo, the experimental camera app that brings a unique blend of computational photography and professional controls to the iPhone, the wait is finally over. An update has just landed, re-enabling and fully supporting the selfie (front-facing) camera on the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air series.
This is a victory for mobile photography enthusiasts who use Project Indigo to push the boundaries of their smartphone camera, as the path to full compatibility has been a notably bumpy one.
The iPhone 17 Camera Challenge
When the iPhone 17 series launched, it brought significant hardware changes, particularly to the front-facing camera. Apple introduced a new, non-traditional sensor design—often described as square-format—which also ties into features like Center Stage.
For third-party apps like Project Indigo, which requires deep, low-level access to the camera pipeline to perform its advanced computational work, this new sensor design caused compatibility problems.
The Delay: The app was completely unusable on the iPhone 17 series for a time.
The Partial Fix (Late October): Adobe eventually pushed an update to enable the powerful rear cameras on the new phones, but the selfie camera remained disabled. This was a necessary workaround while they waited for a critical software fix from Apple.
The Final Fix (Yesterday): The latest app update, following the public release of the necessary iOS update (likely iOS 26.1), finally addresses the underlying technical hurdles. The iPhone 17's selfie camera is now fully functional within Project Indigo.
🎨 Why Project Indigo is Worth the Wait
Project Indigo is far from a standard camera app. Developed by Adobe Labs (and led by computational photography veteran Marc Levoy, known for his work on the Google Pixel camera), it's designed to give the iPhone an "SLR-like" quality and professional-grade control.
Here’s what users on the iPhone 17 series can now fully exploit on both front and rear cameras:
1. Advanced Computational Photography
Instead of one photo, Project Indigo captures a rapid burst of multiple frames (up to 32) for every shot. These frames are then aligned and merged to produce an image with:
Significantly reduced noise in low light.
Higher dynamic range, preserving detail in both highlights and shadows.
Zero-Shutter Lag in Photo Mode, ensuring you capture the exact moment.
2. Professional Manual Controls
The app transforms the iPhone into a manual shooting tool, allowing photographers to dial in settings that are often hidden in the native camera app:
Full Control: Manual adjustment of Focus, Shutter Speed, ISO, Exposure Compensation, and White Balance (Temp/Tint).
Night Mode Customization: Manual control over the number of frames to merge for long exposures and extreme noise reduction.
3. Super-Resolution Zoom
Project Indigo tackles the soft, blurry look of digital zoom by using a multi-frame super-resolution technique. By cleverly combining data from multiple slightly-shifted frames, it restores much of the detail lost by digital scaling, making zoomed-in shots significantly sharper.
4. The "Natural Look"
Unlike the often over-processed and hyper-saturated images from many smartphone cameras, Project Indigo aims for a more natural, DSLR-like aesthetic. This applies a gentle, subtle treatment to subjects and skies, resulting in a cleaner, more editable image, especially when shooting in DNG (RAW) format.
The Takeaway for iPhone 17 Users
This update signifies that the integration challenges posed by Apple's new hardware are being overcome by third-party developers. For serious mobile photographers who have been stuck between their new iPhone 17 and their favorite experimental app, the latest release of Project Indigo means you no longer have to choose.
You can now flip the camera around and take a high-quality, computationally enhanced selfie with all the granular control and superior image processing that Project Indigo offers.
Are you an Adobe Project Indigo user? Which feature are you most excited to use with the newly enabled front camera?
