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.

‘The input is a candid snapshot. Beside it is a critique of the photo – good points and bad – provided by a large language model (LLM) at the press of a button in the AI Playground. A second button produces suggestions for reshooting, in case you are still in the moment, as well as suggestions for editing afterwards.’

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 can remove distracting people from the background of an image using artificial intelligence.

It can also remove cars.

And even fog, although this is decidedly a more AI-heavy type of edit.

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.

Project Indigo can stylize images using AI.

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.

It can also show users how an artwork may look if it were a photo.

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.