The experimental tools enable distraction removal, art style–based edits and more, but only for a small subset of users.
Last year, Adobe’s Nextcam team launched Project Indigo, an experimental camera app for iPhones that offered full manual controls and promised a more natural look from smartphone photos. Now, the team has announced AI Playground, an experimental generative AI tool inside of Project Indigo.
In its announcement, Adobe explains that text-based editing is still clunky, both in its results and usability. This new tool aims to improve that experience by keeping more of the process – both capture and edit – in one app. It says that AI Playground aims to “explore how generative AI can assist mobile photographers at the point of capture.”
AI Playground offers a handful of buttons that, when tapped, trigger specific generative AI prompts engineered by Adobe. These include options for removing distractions, creating a shallow depth of field, applying certain styles, changing lighting and critiquing photos. There’s also a Custom Edit button where users can input their own prompts, either via typing or dictation. For now, Adobe says it is using Google’s Nano Banana model, but that is subject to change, and may even change on a per-button basis.
The “Styles” button allows users to apply a range of preset styles, turning photos into drawings or paintings or changing the lighting. Adobe says the available options “represent techniques we have found to be most successful when applied to everyday snapshots,” so it isn’t an endless list. It also clarifies that it trained the model to identify and highlight the main subject to keep focus on the most important parts of the photo.
Object Editing offers tools familiar to editing apps, but Adobe says it is “exploring whether simple editing operations can be performed in the camera app using a generative model.” There are buttons for removing distractions and creating a shallow depth of field. If those specific tools don’t cover what you are looking to do, the Custom Edits button lets you change almost anything, similar to standalone generative AI tools. That includes completely swapping out backgrounds and specifying different styles. Adobe also showed off the ability to turn a drawing into a photo-like image, or change a sculpture into a “real” person.
Adobe also highlighted the feedback section, which looks to be a more robust version of Google’s “Camera Coach.” It says that it is aimed at helping users learn or advance their photography by providing critique. The tool can provide both reshooting suggestions since it operates within a camera app, along with editing suggestions. Adobe says it is “working on customizing these prompts to reflect individual phone models and lenses, each of which has unique capabilities,” so that users get suggestions specific to what their phone is capable of.
There are some caveats with the AI Playground. First, while it’s free (for now) and doesn’t require sign-in, Adobe is only rolling this out to a small percentage of Project Indigo users. It says that if AI Playground is successful, there will be a paid version. Adobe also makes it clear that this is an experiment inside of an experimental app, so things are subject to change. You need to be connected to the internet to use AI Playground, and to save transmission and generation time, images are 2K pixels on a side.
The Nextcam team also explains that it has had to create a workaround for HDR images, as image-generation models only output SDR images at this point. So, if you use Nano Banana to edit an HDR photo (even one taken with Project Indigo), it will produce an SDR image. To address this, Adobe says it built a custom ML model to post-process the SDR image and boost it back to HDR, but warns that it isn’t always accurate.
The announcement also briefly addresses ethics as well. Adobe says it is “working to attach metadata to AI-edited images produced from the AI Playground by using technology from Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative,” and specifies that some models, such as Nano Banana, apply invisible watermarks to images. At the end of the day, though, Adobe puts the onus on users: “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.”
Ethics aside, it seems like an interesting move for the app, given that the original goal of Project Indigo was to produce more natural images that offer “SLR-like” quality from your iPhone. DPReview’s Dale Baskin even chose Project Indigo as his Gear of the Year last year, because it unlocked the ability to take more natural images, encouraging him to use his phone for photos more often. The AI Playground tools, however, seem to take things in a very different, more synthetic direction.
For those interested in testing AI Playground, you’ll need to update the Project Indigo app to version 1.1. If you are one of the selected users, you’ll see a screen pop up inviting you to use the feature. If you’re not a fan of GenAI in your camera app and you get invited, you can simply decline and keep using Project Indigo as you did before. Adobe also says that the Nextcam team is working on non-GenAI computational photography features that it plans to launch soon.
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