Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Adobe’s experimental camera app has taken an unexpected turn. After launching Project Indigo last year to provide a “more natural (SLR-like) look” to iPhone photography, the Indigo camera app is now being updated with a range of generative AI tools. The change is not based on Adobe’s Firefly AI models.
Adobe describes the new “AI Playground” suite of tools as an experiment and says there is a button that allows users to opt out and continue using the app as before. Free, no-login access to the group will be tested with a small percentage of Indigo users over the next few weeks. “Our goal is to see how people use GenAI-powered editing. Depending on its success, we may expand the trial, expand the user pool, or conduct follow-up experiments,” says Adobe colleague Mark Levoy in Advertising blog. “If the feature proves popular, we will eventually offer a paid version.”
Indigo’s AI Playground, added with the version 1.1 update, includes four sections: Styles, Object Editing, Image Orientation, and Custom Editing. Each section contains “multiple buttons or toggles, which run GenAI through the prompts we designed for it,” says Levoy. If you don’t like the results of the adjustment, you can press the button again and “usually get something a little different.”
Styles apply pre-generated AI filter effects to photos captured with Indigo, making them look like illustrations, changing lighting effects, and more. Object editing includes tools that remove people, objects, and other distractions from image backgrounds, while using generative AI to fill in the remaining empty spaces, similar to Google’s Magic Eraser feature. Photo Guidance is a feedback feature that lets AI analyze your photos to make suggestions for reshoots and editing.
The final feature, Custom Edit, is a broader prompt that allows users to describe how they want to process the image in more detail. For example, if you’re not satisfied with the results of a Style preset, Custom Edit lets you specify what else you want to change. Adobe is relying on Google’s Nano Banana AI model to launch this update, but says it may switch or provide additional support for the model over time.
It’s a far cry from that experience Indigo was provided at launchas my colleague Alison described it as “A camera app created by camera nerds for camera nerdsIt uses computational photography features to help mobile photographers take better quality images that recreate the look of SLR images, along with providing manual controls such as focus, shutter speed, ISO and white balance. However, the introduction of generative AI editing features may have been planned from the beginning.
“This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe — toward an all-in-one mobile camera and editing experience that leverages the latest advances in computational photography and artificial intelligence,” Levoy said. Indigo app was launched for the first time.
It is worth noting that the experiment also lacks the same level of attention to AI transparency Adobe normally practices. Levoy says the Indigo team is working on adding C2PA content credentials — a metadata standard for identifying AI content that Adobe’s Firefly models already use extensively — to images handled by Indigo’s generative AI tools, and notes that Nano Banana is already implementing Google’s invisible features. SynthID watermark.
“Whether the edits you apply are ‘fair’ or ‘misleading’ depends on what you do, who you share images with, and how you present them.” Levoy says. “Ultimately, nothing can be done that diminishes the importance of acting responsibly.”
