Halide Mark III vs Project Indigo
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Halide Mark III
This professional camera app offers advanced manual controls and powerful tools for deliberate photography. Capture stunning RAW images, utilize Neural Macro for close-ups on any iPhone, and access features like focus peaking and histograms. Learn photography with included lessons and customize your shooting experience.
- Manual exposure and focus controls
- Neural Macro for close-up shots
- 14-bit RAW and ProRAW capture
- Exposure tools: histograms, waveform, zebras
- Focus peaking and loupe
- Gesture-based interface
- Included photography lessons
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Halide unleashes your iPhone’s camera. Disable iPhone processing for natural photos, apply powerful film situations, access manual controls, and more. Halide has over 24,000 5-star ratings and is an App Store Editors’ Choice and Apple Design Award winner. Halide’s Looks are built into the camera itself, changing how your photo is captured and processed - not just a color filter applied after the fact. These are the best photos you can get out of an iPhone. Start with Process Zero for natural, film-like results, without any AI or computational photography. Explore our rich set of creative Looks developed with Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly, and powered by sophisticated film simulation. For nine years, Halide has set the standard for professional iPhone camera control. Nail your manual focus with Focus Peaking and the Focus Loupe. Compose your shots with intention using sophisticated framing guides, from a basic grid and rule of thirds, to the golden ratio and rabatment of the rectangle. Get perfect macro shots with Halide's dedicated Macro Mode. Hate editing? Halide gives you amazing results straight out of the camera. But when you need to fine-tune, Photo Lab makes it fast and intuitive. Try dramatically different Looks, adjust framing and exposure, experiment with film simulation, or rescue details in highlights and shadows with Tone Fusion. You can even import and load RAWs from other apps, such as Apple’s own camera app, or standalone cameras by Canon, Nikon, Sony, Leica, Fujifilm, and Hasselblad. Specific formats are listed below. *Halide is a paid app. Try it free for 7 days with an annual membership, or buy it outright with a one-time purchase — no subscription required.* Features: - Shoot without Apple’s computational photography for stronger contrast and more natural results. - Photographic Looks developed in collaboration with esteemed Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly. - Rescue details in shadows and highlights with a Tone Fusion slider inspired by darkroom dodging and burning. - Try any Look on existing ProRAW files - including photos shot in Apple’s camera app. - Become a better photographer by signing up for our 10-day tutorial directly from the app. - Full manual exposure controls including shutter speed, ISO and white balance. - Technical Readout to view all details of your iPhone camera hardware. - Also runs on iPad, for an amazing Photo Lab experience. RAW File Support: - DNG (iPhone, Leica) - CR2 (Canon) - CR3 (Canon) - NEF (Nikon) - RAF (Fujifilm) - ARW (Sony) - FFF (Hasselblad) Terms of Use can be found here: https://halide.cam/terms Privacy: https://www.lux.camera/privacy/
Project Indigo
This app offers advanced computational photography with manual controls for a natural, SLR-like image look. It captures bursts of photos to create high-quality images with reduced noise and enhanced dynamic range, suitable for both casual and professional users.
- Computational photography pipeline
- Natural image look (SLR-like)
- Full manual camera controls
- Photo and Night modes
- Super-resolution for zoom
- Macro mode
- Live viewfinder with histogram and zebra striping
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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 Take full control of how Indigo captures the image: manually specify focus, exposure time and ISO, exposure compensation, or white balance. 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 longer capture time. 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 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 is a variant of the AI-based denoising from Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It uses DNG as input, and it saves a new DNG to your camera roll. - Remove Reflections is a variant of the technology from Camera Raw and Lightroom desktop clients. It uses DNG as input, and it saves a medium-resolution JPEG to your camera roll. It tries to remove reflections when shooting through plate glass windows covering most of the camera field of view. - Face Dewarp corrects warp on faces near the edge of images captured using wide-angle lenses. It uses DNG or JPEG as input and saves a JPEG to your camera roll.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Halide Mark III at 4.4 against Project Indigo's 3.8. Halide Mark III also leads on ratings volume (13K vs 702) and chart position (#161 vs unranked). Project Indigo's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 3). On price, review sentiment, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Halide Mark III sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month. Project Indigo asks for nothing beyond the download.
Halide Mark III holds the better App Store score, 4.4 against 3.8. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Halide Mark III has 13K ratings behind it against 702, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 41% of Halide Mark III's written reviews are positive against 45% of Project Indigo's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Halide Mark III ships an update every 11 days, Project Indigo every 3 weeks. Both last shipped on September 24, 2026.
| Parameter | Halide Mark III | Project Indigo |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.4 (13K ratings) — better | 3.8 (702 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 40.9% of reviews | 45.2% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 13K — better | 702 |
| Update frequency | Every 11 days — better | Every 3 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Best chart rank | #161 — better | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 — better | 18.5 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 84 MB | 347 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Lux Optics Incorporated | Adobe Labs, Inc. |
Customer experience
Halide Mark III
Project Indigo
User reviews
Halide Mark III
From 13K App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 Powerful manual controls
- 👍 Intuitive and clean interface
- 🔍 Excellent RAW capture and editing
- 📷 Macro and depth features
- 🎨 Great image quality and color
Room to improve
- 🐛 Occasional crashes and bugs
- 🔍 Depth/portrait mode limitations
- 🕰️ Slow performance on older devices
- 💰 Expensive subscription model
- 🔒 Lack of free trial or demo
Project Indigo
From 702 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 👍 Excellent image quality
- 🚀 Powerful processing algorithms
- 🔍 Impressive zoom and detail enhancement
Room to improve
- 🔥 Overheating issues
- 🔋 Battery drain
- 🐛 Focusing problems
- 🚫 Incompatible with some regions/devices
Bugs and requests
Halide Mark III
Reported bugs
3 issues- Photos not saving properly
- Zoom functionality issues
- Landscape mode UI problems
Requested features
5 requests- Shutter speed adjustment
- Live depth/bokeh preview
- Custom white balance
- Time-lapse and video recording
- Ability to save settings/presets
Project Indigo
Reported bugs
2 issues- Shutter sound cannot be disabled
- AI-based features causing loss of detail
Requested features
3 requests- Support for higher resolution photos
- Improved tap-to-focus functionality
- Better optimization for battery and thermal performance
In-app purchases
Halide Mark III
- Pro Camera, Editor, and Lessons$9.991 Month
- Pro Camera, Editor, and Lessons7 Days trial$19.991 Year
- One Time Purchase$69.99
Project Indigo
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Halide Mark III free?
Is Project Indigo free?
Which has better reviews, Halide Mark III or Project Indigo?
Do Halide Mark III or Project Indigo have ads?
Which is updated more often, Halide Mark III or Project Indigo?
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