An AI playground for the Project Indigo camera app

An AI playground for the Project Indigo camera app

Marc Levoy July 22, 2026

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At left is the user interface of our Playground, running on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. At center is a snapshot of a stone lantern captured by Indigo. At right is the result of tapping on Object Editing -> Depth of field to defocus the background, then Styles -> Ink line with color wash , converting the photograph to an illustration with a soft background.

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:

These photos were taken using Indigo, then re-rendered using buttons from our AI Playground Styles menu. The buttons are (top to bottom) Pen and ink , Ink line with color wash , and Golden hour lighting . The prompts behind our buttons are more complicated than the button names, and have been refined through experimentation to highlight the main subject. Thus, it can turn the overly busy garden photograph (middle row) into a pleasing illustration with a focus on the bridge. In the third row, note that the woman's face changes slightly. We'll come back to this identity shift problem later. By the way, while Indigo photos are high dynamic range (HDR), traditional artistic techniques (first two rows) are not, since they can be no brighter than the paper on which they are drawn. Our renderings respect this characteristic.

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

LINK:	https://creativecow.net/an-ai-playground-for-the-project-indigo-camera...
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