Adobe Project Indigo adds AI Playground with photo critiques and generative editing tools

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 awesome Pixel Camera-ish iPhone app is getting even better

Last year, Adobe launched an iPhone camera app built by a team that included two of the minds behind the popular Pixel Camera app. The app, called "Project Indigo," offers a bunch of useful features, including manual controls and the HDR+ approach of the original Google Camera to capture photos with better dynamic range. Now, Adobe is introducing some impressive new features in the app. Adobe today announced in a blog post that it's adding an "AI Playground" to the Project Indigo camera app. This is an experimental feature that uses Google's Nano Banana model, but the company says it could switch models in the future, or even offer different models to different users as a kind of A/B test. AI Playground in the Project Indigo app brings four features: object editing, photo styles, photo guidance, and custom edit. Object editing offers buttons for object categories that can be used to remove those objects from the image. It also supports a "Custom Edit" option that lets users type what they want to remove. In an example shared by Adobe, Custom Edit is used to remove the fog obscuring the Golden Gate Bridge, and Project Indio removes the fog and generates the rest of the bridge, along with the city of San Francisco in the background. "Photo Styles" is a fairly self-explanatory feature and includes styles like "Pen and Ink," "Ink line with color wash," and "Golden hour lighting." The Custom Edit feature, meanwhile, offers the most flexibility while editing. It can be used to convert images to hand-drawn illustrations in the style of, say, Da Vinci. However, it can also be used to convert illustrations into images, or statues into photos of people. Perhaps more interesting than any of these is the new "Photo Guidance" feature. With this, Project Indigo uses AI to critique your photos and offer helpful advice on reshooting them for better results or editing them for the best final output. The company is also working to improve the feature by introducing suggestions for cropping and composition. AI Playground in Project Indigo is available as a free experiment to a small fraction of users for a few weeks. Adobe says it will analyze how the experiment performs in users' hands and use that data to decide whether to offer it as a full-fledged feature within the app. The company could also offer a paid version in the future.

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.

Adobe Project Indigo v1.1 adds AI Playground with generative AI photo editing tools

Adobe has introduced AI Playground, an experimental feature in Project Indigo 1.1 that adds generative AI-powered editing tools to its camera app. The feature allows users to edit photos after capture without transferring them to a separate editing application or web service. Project Indigo 1.1. Project Indigo was launched by Adobe's Nextcam Team as an experimental computational photography camera app. It offers full manual controls, JPEG and RAW image capture, an SLR-like image rendering approach, and features such as removing reflections while photographing through windows. Adobe said generative AI image editing has advanced, but prompt-based workflows still have limitations. Text prompts can produce different results depending on interpretation and context, often requiring multiple attempts. Existing workflows also require users to move images between camera and editing apps, making it difficult to edit photos while still at the shooting location. AI Playground integrates generative AI editing and photography guidance into the camera workflow. AI Playground features AI Playground includes four sections: Object Editing, Styles, Photo Guidance, and Custom Edit. * Object Editing: Provides tools to remove unwanted objects and distractions, blur backgrounds to create a shallow depth-of-field effect, and remove selected distraction categories. Users can add custom categories through text or voice input and save or delete them. * Styles: Applies photographic and artistic styles to captured images using generative AI models that can recreate traditional artistic techniques. * Photo Guidance: Analyzes photos and provides editing and reshooting suggestions while users are still at the shooting location. Adobe is also working on customizing suggestions for individual smartphone models and lenses, including capabilities such as minimum focus distance. The company is exploring composition and cropping recommendations using additionally captured ultra-wide photos or videos. * Custom Edit: Allows users to create edits using their own text prompts. Prompts can be typed or dictated, then edited, saved, or deleted. AI Playground buttons use Adobe-engineered prompts, and users can repeat an operation to generate another variation. After capturing a photo with Project Indigo, users can open it through the built-in filmstrip or full-screen gallery and access AI Playground using the sparkle icon. The feature works only with photos captured using Project Indigo. AI models and image processing AI Playground initially uses Google's Nano Banana image-generation model. Adobe said it may switch models over time or use different models for specific features. Some tools may also use Adobe's Firefly models, including object removal capabilities for removing distractions while preserving other parts of an image. The feature uses cloud-based AI processing and requires an internet connection through Wi-Fi or cellular data. Generated images are returned at approximately 2K resolution to reduce transmission and processing time. Additional technical details include: * If generation fails due to server issues, users can retry the request. * Images or prompts that violate Nano Banana's AI safety policies may be rejected. * Repeated safety violations may result in removal from the experiment. * Project Indigo captures HDR photos, while current generative AI models output SDR images. * Adobe uses a custom machine learning model to convert SDR AI-generated output back into HDR using the original HDR photo as guidance. * The original HDR image is used only for HDR enhancement and is not used for model training. * HDR reconstruction may be less accurate when AI-generated images have significantly different colours or tones from the original image. Future development Adobe is continuing to develop AI Playground with additional editing tools and photography guidance features focused on common editing tasks and prompts. The Nextcam Team is also working on non-generative AI computational photography improvements, including low-light image quality improvements. Areas under development include: * Generative editing controls: Adobe is exploring additional controls and workflows as current prompt-based systems require users to modify prompts and generate multiple versions. * Identity preservation: Generative models can alter facial features or expressions in edited images. Adobe is exploring reference-photo-based approaches and technologies that can automatically identify suitable reference images. * On-device AI models: Adobe is researching smaller AI models that can run directly on smartphones. The company said current large image-generation models are generally cloud-based due to their size, while smaller models created through distillation currently provide fewer capabilities. Content authenticity and availability Adobe is working to add Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) metadata to AI-edited images created through AI Playground. Some AI models used by the feature, including Nano Banana, also apply invisible watermarks to generated images. Project Indigo's AI Playground was developed by Mohammad Haque, Boris Ajdin, Ruiming Cao, and Marc Levoy with support from the Nextcam Team.

An AI playground for the Project Indigo camera app

One year ago, Adobe's Nextcam Team launched an experimental camera app called Project Indigo. The app offers full manual controls, a natural (SLR-like) look, and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide - in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduced some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps, like the ability to remove reflections when photographing through windows. In the intervening year, text-based image generation has improved markedly, and leading GenAI models now offer the ability to edit images, not just generate them from scratch. That said, it's still early days for generative image editing. Text is an awkward way to control such an editor. Even the most precise prompt is ambiguous - depending on assumptions, context, and cultural background. As a result, prompt-driven GenAI models seldom do exactly what you want, requiring multiple throws of the dice to get a good result. In addition, the workflow can be complex, often requiring users to transfer photos from a camera app to a web site or GenAI-powered editing app. This means that it's hard to edit photos in the moment, i.e. while you're still looking at the scene. The Nextcam team at Adobe has been exploring solutions to these problems, and we're excited to announce an experimental AI Playground inside the Indigo camera app. Our goal is to explore how generative AI can assist mobile photographers at the point of capture. 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. It also provides buttons that return a critique of your photo, including suggestions for reshooting or editing. The former only makes sense in a camera app, where you are still standing in front of the scene. Finally, it includes a Custom Edit button, which lets you enter an arbitrary text prompt. How to use the AI Playground 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. When you update to Project Indigo version 1.1 and re-launch the app, you may see a splash screen announcing the availability of AI Playground. If so, then you are being invited to participate in our experiment. To take part, you must agree to share with us your button presses while using the Playground. But we won't look at your prompts, or images, or upload them to our servers, or use them to train AI models, and since there's no sign-on, the analytics we gather are anonymous. If you prefer not to participate in the experiment, there's a button for declining; you can then continue using the app as before. To use the Playground, after capturing a photo and reviewing it with Indigo's built-in filmstrip (or full-screen grid), press the sparkle button at the bottom of the screen. (Look for the stars.) We restrict the Playground to photos captured using our app, so if the sparkle button is grayed out, it means this is not an Indigo photograph. The Playground contains four sections: Object Editing, Styles, Photo Guidance, and Custom Edit. Each section contains multiple buttons or toggles, which trigger GenAI with prompts we have engineered for them. If you don't like what you get, press the button again; you'll typically get something slightly different. If none of the buttons do what you want, use the Custom Edit section to type, edit, save, and delete custom prompts. By the way, you can dictate instead of typing; it's faster, and GenAI's large language models overlook most transcription errors. Applying 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. Here are some examples: Object editing Project Indigo is not a photo editor, but as part of AI Playground we are exploring whether simple editing operations can be performed in the camera app using a generative model. Specifically, 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. Here are some examples: Getting feedback on your 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. Since Indigo is a camera app, our AI analysis can provide both reshooting suggestions as well as editing suggestions. Here's an example: Producing useful suggestions is harder than you might think. Our prompt needs to advise the LLM that this is a smartphone photograph. My iPhone 17 Pro Max has several lenses, including telephoto and ultra-wide, but it has no variable optical zoom or adjustable aperture. Thus, it wouldn't be useful to suggest, for example, zooming in or stopping down the lens. We are working on customizing these prompts to reflect individual phone models and lenses, each of which has unique capabilities (including minimum focus distance). We are also working on making suggestions for composition and cropping, based on an additionally captured ultra-wide photo or video. Thinking out of the box While our AI Playground provides buttons for many common generative editing operations, our Custom Edit button unlocks the full power of arbitrary text prompts. Here are some ways you can use this capability: Let's think even further out of the box. Our Styles buttons let you make photographs look like hand-drawn illustrations. Could we go the other way? Check out these examples: 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? A peek under the hood The GenAI model we'll start with is Google's Nano Banana, but we may switch models over time, or give different models to different users to help inform our approach. We may also use different models for different buttons, including one of Adobe's own Firefly models. Firefly's models are particularly good at removing distractors without touching the rest of the photo. Since Nano Banana is a cloud-based model, you need to be connected to the internet (by wifi or cellular data) in order to use AI Playground. To save transmission and generation time, our result images are roughly 2k pixels on a side - lower than full resolution but large enough for sharing. If the generation fails due to server issues, we'll let you know, and you should try again. If you violate one of Nano Banana's AI safety filters, either because of your input image or your prompt, we'll let you know that as well. If you violate their safety standards too often, we'll remove you from the experiment. One more thing. Current leading image-generation models output standard dynamic range (SDR) images, so using Nano Banana to edit the HDR photos captured by Indigo's camera app produces an image that looks disappointingly bland on the small screen, at least compared to the HDR photo. To address this limitation, we have built a custom ML model to post-process the standard dynamic range (SDR) images returned by Nano Banana, boosting them back to HDR. To improve the accuracy of this boosting, we use your captured HDR photo as guidance (but we don't train the model on your photos). The boosting isn't always accurate, especially if Nano Banana returned an image whose colors and tones are very different from your captured photograph, but it usually works well. What's next? This free public experiment is the beginning of a journey. I've already suggested some of our ongoing work, for example around giving advice on taking better photos. We are also expanding the set of buttons we offer, focusing on common editing needs and prompts that work reliably. The Nextcam team is also developing some exciting non-GenAI computational photography features that we plan to launch soon, including image quality improvements in low light. But there are some elephants in the generative editing room, so let's spend some time talking about them. First, prompt-driven GenAI models are hard to control, except by changing the prompt and trying again. There are no sliders in these models. Inventing appropriate controls for generative editing, and incorporating them into easy-to-use workflows, is a challenge facing the entire imaging industry. Indigo is no exception, and we're constantly exploring, so stay tuned. Second, GenAI models may change details of your photographs that you don't want changed, especially facial shape and expressions. The accepted strategy for reducing this so-called identity shift is through reference photos, either by submitting them to the GenAI model along with your photo, or by using them to train a helper model, which knows what your subject(s) look like in other photos and contexts. Curating reference photos introduces friction into the user experience, so it would be better if you didn't need to do it yourself. Fortunately, the same technology used to help you search your camera roll can also help you curate useful reference photos. Third, GenAI is slow, and the best models are large, hence cloud-only. This requires constant connectivity, which may not be available when you're photographing condors in California or bison in the Badlands. The accepted solution is distillation, where large models are used to teach smaller models that can run on your phone. So far, smaller models have proven less capable; for example, they may not be able to re-render your photograph as an etching by Piranesi, because they've never heard of that artist. Work is ongoing in the AI research community. Finally, a note about ethics. Like any GenAI model, the AI Playground can be used to remove a trash can or a wire fence, to stylize your skateboard trick or to make it look like you caught more air than you really did. We are working to attach metadata to AI-edited images produced from the AI Playground by using technology from Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative. In addition, some of the GenAI models we use apply invisible watermarks to the images themselves, including Nano Banana. But in the end, 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. If I add motion blur to a photograph of me bicycling and send it to my children, they respond with "Cute, Dad." They enjoy the game, but nobody is fooled. In the end, nothing can be implemented that reduces the importance of behaving responsibly. Closing thoughts Project Indigo's AI Playground was developed by Mohammad Haque, Boris Ajdin, Ruiming Cao, and Marc Levoy, with help from the entire Nextcam team. I hope this blog has conveyed our excitement about the Playground. I use it every day, typically right after capturing a photo, with the plan to share the photo right away. I find the Playground useful, and it often makes the difference between a throwaway snapshot and a sharable one. Most of all, it's fun. Our expectation is that our AI Playground will prove popular. 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. As with all our technologies, we're always looking for feedback. A good place for this is in our public forum. We'd love to see the results you get with the AI Playground and we'd like to hear your suggestions for improving it. Check out this Lightroom album of additional examples and, if you're admitted to the experiment, try the Playground for yourself!

Adobe Project Indigo updated with live photo coaching: smarter edits arrive on iPhone

Playground gives select users AI feedback on framing and lighting Adobe has updated Project Indigo, its Adobe Labs camera app for iPhone, with a new feature called Playground that adds generated edits and live coaching while you shoot. Project Indigo first showed up in June 2025 as an Adobe Labs release, built with help from former Google Pixel Camera engineers. The pitch is pretty specific: photos that look more natural and a little closer to what you'd expect from an SLR, rather than the glossy, overprocessed look a lot of phone camera apps tend to produce. Playground can remove objects, apply artistic styles, and handle other AI-generated edits. The more interesting part, though, is the photo critique tool. It can flag issues with composition, framing, lighting, and subject placement while you're still lining up the shot, instead of waiting until afterward and trying to patch things up in editing. According to Adobe, this is a limited-time experiment rolling out to a small, randomly selected group of Project Indigo users. Right now it runs on Google's Nano Banana image model, not Adobe Firefly. Adobe also hasn't said whether Playground will remain inside Project Indigo or eventually show up in a more widely used app like Lightroom Mobile. If you already use Project Indigo on your iPhone and like the idea of a camera app that teaches as you shoot, this is one to watch, even if access hasn't reached you yet. Project Indigo is available on iPhone through Adobe Labs.