Adobe Project Indigo AI Playground critiques photos and suggests edits using generative AI

Adobe camera app's new feature will critique your photos using AI

Adobe is adding new AI-powered features to its experimental iOS camera app called Project Indigo, launched last year. The app previously offered pro controls, multi-frame super-resolution, and different capture modes, and is now adding features that will use LLMs (large language models) to critique photos and provide editing suggestions. It's also adding other AI features, like advanced object removal, depth of field generation, and the ability to add different styles to photos. Marc Levoy, the person heading Adobe's project, had previously developed Pixel's camera chops. He said that most generative AI tools provide prompt-based editing and, often, finding the perfect prompt to tweak a photo or get the right result can be a tricky endeavour. That's why most of the new experimental AI features are buttons that can generate more deterministic outputs. For instance, Google's camera coach feature for Pixel phones, launched last year, offered more generic framing suggestions. Project Indigo's features, by comparison, are fairly descriptive and could help you learn some photography tricks, even if you don't agree with the AI assessment. There are two features in this category. First is the photo critique, which includes a "professional" opinion about framing, lighting, colors, and emotional impact. The second is capture and edit suggestions, which give you tips about reshooting the photo on how you can change framing, exposure, and objects in the viewfinder. For instance, the app told me to remove the hexagonal white object in the frame from a photo I took. A second section tells you how you can use an existing photo to make it better using Adobe Lightroom controls. Photography apps, including Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Adobe Photoshop, have offered object removal for years. But the feature often depends on the user circling or selecting an object by drawing on the screen, which is not perfect every time. Project Indigo's new feature gives you toggles for things to remove from an image, like people in the background, trash and trash cans, wires and poles, fences, vehicles, and other clutter. You can also describe a custom object to remove. The results of this feature are pretty impressive. The app removed my friend and the object he was holding from the background without creating any strange artifacts. The app also allows you to use AI to create depth of field for a photo to simulate a blurred background. With this new update, Adobe is also experimenting with the style transfer feature, which lets you turn your picture into tones like watercolor, pen and ink, ink line with color wash, monochromatic, and backlit subject. Some styles remind me of the early days of the Prisma app. With advanced models, the outputs look refined, but style transfer is not a new or useful feature. Despite Levoy's criticism of the prompt-based implementation, Project Indigo has its own feature that lets you describe your edit. Users can use it to perform edit flows that are not available in preset tools. But this is also a potential road to slopland. The company is using Google's Gemini-based Nano Banana for these features, but it's open to swapping in other models, including its own Adobe Firefly model. These features, bundled under the AI playground tab, are still in a testing phase, and only select users will get access to them. These features might not ever make it to a wider audience, but it is good to see some features that can make people aware of nuances in photography, rather than just creating more slop.

Adobe's 'natural look' camera app embraces generative AI

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" for iPhone photography, the Indigo camera app is now being updated with a suite of generative AI tools. And the change doesn't rely upon Adobe's own Firefly AI models. Adobe describes the new "AI Playground" tooling suite as an experiment and says there's a button that allows users to opt out and continue using the app as before. Free access to the suite with no sign-on requirement is being tested with a small percentage of Indigo users over the next few weeks. "Our goal is to learn how people use GenAI-powered editing. Depending on its success we may extend the experiment, or expand the user pool, or run follow-on experiments," Adobe fellow Marc Levoy says in the announcement blog. "If the feature proves popular, we will eventually offer a paid version." The Indigo app's AI Playground, added with the version 1.1 update, includes four sections: Styles, Object Editing, Photo Guidance, and Custom Edit. Levoy says each section contains "multiple buttons or toggles, which trigger GenAI with prompts we have engineered for them." If you don't like the results of an edit, you can press the button again and " typically get something slightly different." Styles applies preset AI-generated filter effects to photographs snapped using Indigo, making them look like illustrations, changing the lighting effects, and more. Object Editing includes tools that remove people, objects, and other distractions from the backgrounds of images, with generative AI then used to fill in the blank spaces left behind, similar to Google's Magic Eraser 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 Edit, is a broader prompting tool that lets users describe how they want to manipulate an image in more detail. For example, if you're unhappy with the results of a Styles preset, Custom Edit allows you to specify what else to change. Adobe is leaning on Google's Nano Banana AI model for this update "to start," but says it may switch or introduce additional model support over time. It's a far cry from the experience that Indigo provided at launch, with my colleague Allison describing it as a "camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds." It uses computational photography features to help mobile photographers capture better-quality images that re-create the look of SLR photos, alongside providing manual controls like focus, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance. The introduction of generative AI editing features may have been planned from the start, however. "This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe -- towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI," Levoy said when the Indigo app first launched. Notably, the experiment also lacks the same level of consideration toward AI transparency that Adobe usually exerts. Levoy says the Indigo team is working toward adding C2PA Content Credentials -- a metadata standard for identifying AI content that's already widely used by Adobe's Firefly models -- to images manipulated by Indigo's generative AI tools and notes that Nano Banana already applies Google's invisible SynthID watermark. "Whether the edits you apply are 'fair' or 'misleading' depend on what you do, who you share the images with, and how you present them." Levoy says. "In the end, nothing can be implemented that reduces the importance of behaving responsibly."

Adobe's Project Indigo gets an experimental AI Playground

Adobe is rolling out a limited test today that gives select Project Indigo users access to several generative AI-powered photo-editing tools. Here are the details. Adobe's Project Indigo gets an experimental AI Playground A little more than a year ago, Adobe announced Project Indigo, a free experimental iPhone camera app offering full manual controls and a more natural, SLR-like approach to computational photography. Last April, the company expanded Project Indigo to select iPads and the iPhone 17e, in an update that also introduced a new grid view, photo filtering, and several stability and image-quality improvements. Today, Adobe is expanding Project Indigo's toolset once again, with an AI Playground. Here's Adobe: Since Indigo is an experimental app, and this is an experiment inside Indigo, we're offering the AI Playground for free, with no sign-on required. However, this level of free access will be available only to a few percent of our users, and only for a few weeks. Our goal is to learn how people use GenAI-powered editing. Depending on its success we may extend the experiment, or expand the user pool, or run follow-on experiments. If the feature proves popular, we will eventually offer a paid version. If you're among the users who get access to Project Indigo's AI Playground, you'll see a splash screen inviting you to join the experiment. Adobe says this is optional and, for users who opt in, the company will only collect button presses while using the Playground. This means Adobe "won't look at your prompts, or images, or upload them to [its] servers, or use them to train AI models." The company adds that "since there's no sign-on, the analytics we gather are anonymous." Once the user gets access to Project Indigo's AI Playground, they will see four new sections. Here is Adobe on each feature, accompanied by examples Object Editing: "[...] the Object Editing section of our AI Playground contains buttons for distractor removal and defocusing the background to create a shallow depth of field. Within distractor removal is a list of toggles that allow you to remove one or more categories of distractors. You can also add categories by typing (or dictating) what you want removed, and you can save or delete these additions." Styles: "Most state-of-the-art GenAI models are capable of mimicking traditional artistic techniques. The Styles menu of our AI Playground contains buttons that will re-render your Indigo photo using a variety of techniques. The buttons we provide represent techniques we have found to be most successful when applied to everyday snapshots." Photo Guidance: "Many software products use AI to summarize or critique human-created documents, like email and résumés. We are exploring how to do something similar for photography - to help users learn or advance their photography. Since Indigo is a camera app, our AI analysis can provide both reshooting suggestions as well as editing suggestions." Custom Edit: "While our AI Playground provides buttons for many common generative editing operations, our Custom Edit button unlocks the full power of arbitrary text prompts. [...] Our Styles buttons let you make photographs look like hand-drawn illustrations. Could we go the other way? The conversion of a drawing, painting, or sculpture into a photograph is not only fun; it's also instructive. What could the artists have been looking at, which led to the piece they produced? [...]" Adobe says it is currently using Google's Nano Banana model, which only outputs Standard Dynamic Range (SRD) images, even when the user snaps a shot in High Dynamic Range (HDR). For this reason, the company "built a custom ML model to post-process the standard dynamic range (SDR) images returned by Nano Banana, boosting them back to HDR." Adobe adds that this is not perfect and relies heavily on the output Nano Banana produces. One final note: the company explains that Project Indigo's AI Playground features will only work on images captured with the app. This means that for images imported from elsewhere, the sparkle button that opens the AI Playground will be grayed out. To learn more about Project Indigo's AI Playground, follow this link. Worth checking out on Amazon

Adobe's Project Indigo iPhone Camera App Now Offers Photography Advice

Just over a year ago, Adobe released a new computational photography camera app on iPhone, Project Indigo. It arrived boasting impressive features, including desktop-quality noise reduction and upscaling technology, plus robust camera controls and an emphasis on natural, realistic-looking photos. Today, Adobe launched what it calls "AI Playground" inside Project Indigo, ushering in new ways for photographers to use generative AI. "Our goal is to explore how generative AI can assist mobile photographers at the point of capture," says Adobe's Nextcam Team, the group that developed Project Indigo. "Our initial version offers buttons for removing distractors, adding a shallow depth of field, applying photographic and artistic styles, changing the lighting, and many other functions." Please note that some of the images included in this story are available in HDR on Adobe's website. They cannot be viewed in full HDR here on PetaPixel.. The initial version of AI Playground also includes AI tools that can critique a photo the user just captured, including suggestions for edits or how to reshoot it. An AI that advises the user about how to reshoot an image only really makes sense inside a camera app, Adobe adds. AI Playground is an experimental feature inside an experimental camera app, and with that come some caveats. The most important of which is that only a select pool of Project Indigo users, just "a few percent" of users, will gain access to it. Secondly, the initial release of AI Playground will only be available for a few weeks. "Our goal is to learn how people use GenAI-powered editing," Adobe explains. "Depending on its success we may extend the experiment, or expand the user pool, or run follow-on experiments." If the feature is a smash hit, Adobe says it will eventually release a paid version of it inside Project Indigo. For those users lucky enough to get access to AI Playground, it will only be available to use on photos captured inside Project Indigo, and it will include the option to re-render images using various techniques. Some are illustrative and very artistic; others are more about dramatically changing the look of a photo in a realistic way. Other generative AI editing tools inside AI Playground include the ability to remove distractions from a scene, similar to what Adobe already offers in Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop. Project Indigo launched last year with Reflection Removal, so AI-based editing isn't inherently new to the app with AI Playground. There's even an option to "Remove fog" inside AI Playground. AI Playground also explores how generative AI can be used to analyze and critique photos. "Many software products use AI to summarize or critique human-created documents, like email and résumés. We are exploring how to do something similar for photography -- to help users learn or advance their photography," Adobe says. Inside Indigo, the app will provide feedback on a selected image, including things the photographer did well and other things that could be improved. For example, the app can note distracting elements near the edge of the frame and suggest ways to recompose the shot better. The Nextcam Team is very interested in finding ways to make AI feedback useful and tailored to specific smartphones. For example, one model may have two lenses of a certain focal length, while another phone might have the option to smoothly zoom between focal lengths. These two different users should not necessarily receive the same suggestions. As seen above, AI Playground can turn photos into pseudo-paintings or drawings, but interestingly, the app also works in reverse. A user at a museum can take a photo of a sculpture or painting inside Project Indigo, and AI Playground attempts to recreate that artwork as a photorealistic image. "The conversion of a drawing, painting, or sculpture into a photograph is not only fun; it's also instructive. What could the artists have been looking at, which led to the piece they produced? There are other GenAI apps that can make inanimate objects come to life, or make still photographs move, but having this ability in a camera app - close to the shutter button -- is somehow different. I can tell you that standing in the museum with my phone's screen showing a photograph while I'm looking at a bronze sculpture produced some astonished stares! Remember the movie Night at the Museum, starring Ben Stiller, where the exhibits come to life?" writes Marc Levoy, Adobe Fellow and member of the Nextcam Team. By the way, Levoy notes that the initial release of AI Playground is leveraging Google's Nano Banana, not Adobe Firefly. "Our expectation is that our AI Playground will prove popular," Levoy says. "We can't offer it for free forever, so we encourage readers of this blog to download the newest version of Project Indigo. If you are one of the lucky (randomly chosen) fraction of users, you'll see a splash screen that welcomes you to the AI Playground experiment. You can decline to participate, of course, but why would you? The team and I use the Playground every day, and we're constantly finding fun new things to try with it, which our Custom Edit prompt allows." Project Indigo is available through the Apple App Store for free. Image creditsAdobe Nextcam Team, Marc Levoy. Project Indigo is developed by Mohammad Haque, Boris Ajdin, Ruiming Cao, and Marc Levoy, with help from the entire Nextcam team.

Adobe's Project Indigo camera app can now edit and critique your photos with AI

Adobe's Project Indigo has spent the past year building a reputation as one of the more serious camera apps on iPhone, offering full manual controls and a natural, SLR-style look instead of the overprocessed images most phone camera apps produce by default. Now Adobe is testing a new set of features called AI Playground that push the app well beyond photography. New editing tools and a critic AI Playground brings a handful of AI-powered editing tools to Project Indigo that help you remove distractions from photos, add depth-of-field effects, make stylistic edits, and edit images using natural language prompts. A Photo Critique tool rounds things out, reviewing your shots and offering suggestions on how to improve them, either by reshooting on the spot or editing afterward. Adobe says these tools run on Google's Nano Banana model, which is cloud-based and requires an active internet connection. It adds that edited photos will also be capped at 2K pixels to keep things fast. Adobe plans to mix in other models, including its own Firefly models, over time. It warns that repeatedly triggering Nano Banana's safety filters, whether from your photo or your prompt, can get you booted from the test. Limited access, limited time Adobe says the feature is free for now, but only a small percentage of Project Indigo users will see it in version 1.1, and only for a few weeks. Everyone else is out of luck until Adobe decides whether to expand free access or charge for AI Playground. Recommended Videos If you already use Indigo, it's worth updating and hoping you're among the lucky few. If not, this is a good time to download the app and try out some of the other features it offers over the stock iPhone camera app, including full manual controls and a more natural look that skips the heavy processing baked into the default app.