Adobe is putting generative AI inside Project Indigo, its experimental iPhone camera app that was introduced last year around a more restrained, SLR-like approach to phone photography.
The new version 1.1 update adds what Adobe calls an “AI Playground,” a set of editing tools that can generate stylized looks, remove objects, offer photo feedback and apply custom edits. Adobe is presenting the rollout as a test, not a full product launch, which is the usual corporate way of saying the company wants usage data before it decides how hard to monetize the thing.
Adobe fellow Marc Levoy wrote in an announcement blog post that the company is making the tools available for free, with no sign-in requirement, to a small share of Indigo users over the next few weeks. Users who get the experiment will also see a control that lets them opt out and keep using the app without the AI features, according to Adobe.
Levoy said Adobe wants to see how people use generative AI editing inside a camera app. Depending on the response, he wrote, Adobe may keep the test going, open it to more users or run additional experiments. He also said Adobe would eventually offer a paid version if the feature catches on.
What the tools do
Adobe divides AI Playground into four areas: Styles, Object Editing, Photo Guidance and Custom Edit. Levoy said each area contains buttons or toggles wired to prompts that Adobe has written in advance. In plain English, the app is hiding the prompt box behind interface controls. Tap a button, and the system sends a prepared instruction to a generative AI model.
If an edit misses, Adobe says users can press the same button again and usually get a different variation. That is standard generative AI behavior, dressed up as a camera feature: the model is sampling another result rather than applying a fixed deterministic filter.
The Styles section applies preset generative effects to photos taken in Indigo. Adobe says those effects can make images resemble illustrations, alter lighting and perform similar transformations. Object Editing includes object removal, while Photo Guidance provides chatbot-style feedback, according to Adobe’s description of the update. The Custom Edit section is named by Adobe, though the company’s public summary does not give much more detail about how that part works.
One technical wrinkle: Adobe says the Indigo experiment does not use its own Firefly AI models. The company did not identify the alternative models in the available announcement. That omission matters because model choice affects output, licensing questions and what kind of content the system may have been trained on.
For Indigo users, the practical change is straightforward. An app sold on getting away from the overcooked look of modern phone photography is now testing tools that can synthesize parts of an image after capture. Adobe is keeping the experiment small for now. If people use it, Adobe has already signaled where this probably goes: a paid AI feature inside the camera workflow.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
