Adobe’s experimental camera app has taken an unexpected turn. After Project Indigo was launched last year to provide a “more natural (SLR-like) look” to iPhone photos, the Indigo camera app is now being updated with a range of creative AI tools. And the change does not depend on Adobe Firefly AI models.
Adobe describes the new “AI Playground” toolset as an experiment and says there is a button that allows users to exit and continue using the app as before. Free access to the suite with no login requirement is being tested on a small percentage of Indigo users over the next few weeks. “Our goal is to learn how people use GenAI’s powerful programming. Depending on its success we may expand the trial, or expand the user base, or conduct follow-up tests,” said Adobe partner Marc Levoy in the announcement blog. “If the feature proves popular, eventually we’ll offer you a paid version.”
The AI Playground for the Indigo app, added with the version 1.1 update, includes four sections: Styles, Object Editing, Image Direction, and Custom Editing. Levoy says that each section contains “multiple buttons or toggles, which activate GenAI with commands that we’ve created for ourselves.” If you don’t like the editing results, you can press a button and “get used to getting a little different.”
Styles apply pre-made AI filter effects to photos taken using Indigo, make them look like graphics, change lighting effects, and more. Object Editing includes tools that remove people, objects, and other distractions from the background of images, with AI generated and used to fill in the empty spaces left behind, similar to Google’s Magic Cell feature. Photo Guidance is a feedback feature that allows AI to analyze your photos to provide suggestions for reshoots and editing.
The last feature, Custom Editing, is an extensive customization tool that allows users to define how they want to manipulate the image in more detail. For example, if you’re not happy with the results of preset Styles, Custom Editing lets you specify what else to change. Adobe relies on Google’s Nano Banana AI model for this update to “start,” but says it may change or introduce support for additional models over time.
It’s a far cry from the experience Indigo offered at launch, with our partner Allison describing it as “a camera app built by camera geniuses for camera geniuses.” It uses computer capture features to help mobile photographers capture better quality images that recreate the look of SLR photos, along with providing manual controls such as focus, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance. The introduction of AI’s productive planning features may have been planned from the start, however.
“This is the beginning of Adobe’s journey – towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that leverages the latest advances in computer imaging and AI,” Levoy said when the Indigo app was first launched.
Notably, the test also doesn’t have the same level of consideration in the light of AI that Adobe often uses. Levoy says the Indigo team is working to add C2PA Content Details – the AI content identification metadata standard that is widely used by Adobe’s Firefly models – to the images used by Indigo’s production AI tools and notes that the Nano Banana already uses Google’s invisible SynthID watermark.
“Whether the editing you use is ‘correct’ or ‘misleading’ depends on what you do, who you share the photos with, and how you present them.” Levoy says. “Finally, nothing can be done to diminish the importance of good behavior.”
