AI at the point of capture: what Project Indigo really changes
Adobe’s Project Indigo is an experimental iPhone camera app that now folds a generative AI Playground directly into the shooting workflow, letting users remove distractions, apply artistic styles, receive in-app photo critiques and run text-prompted edits, all tied to images captured within the app itself.
This is not another AI photo editing mobile studio bolted onto the cloud after the fact; it is an attempt to move intelligence into the moment you press the shutter. Project Indigo launched in June 2025 as a camera-first app focused on refined computational photography and subtle processing, promising images with greater depth and detail rather than heavy effects. Adding the AI Playground in version 1.1 marks a deliberate pivot: the team says its goal is “to explore how generative AI can assist mobile photographers at the point of capture”. That ambition matters more than any single feature. It signals where mobile photography is headed: toward cameras that do not only record what you see, but continuously suggest, correct, and reimagine it in real time.
Inside the AI Playground: four tools that turn the camera into a studio
AI Playground arrives in Project Indigo 1.1 with four sections—Object Editing, Styles, Photo Guidance, and Custom Edit—each designed to collapse post-production into a few taps while you shoot. For everyday creators, Object Editing is the most immediately useful: it removes distractions such as people, cars or signs and can blur the background to fake a shallow depth of field, so a busy street portrait starts to look like it was shot on a fast prime lens.
Styles is where real-time image restyle becomes the norm, re-rendering a photo into looks like “pen and ink” or “ink line with color wash,” turning snapshots into illustrations with a single button press. Photo Guidance goes further, reviewing your framing, analysing the photo, and suggesting edits or reshoots while you are still on location. And Custom Edit hands over maximum control: you type or dictate a prompt—say, adding a lantern on a sunlit mountain ledge—and the model attempts that transformation, with the option to save prompts for later reuse.
Powered by Google’s Nano Banana: strengths, limits, and trade-offs
Under the hood, Project Indigo’s AI Playground runs on Google’s Nano Banana image model in the cloud, the same system that went viral for its generative capabilities. That choice is as political as it is technical. Adobe is openly treating the camera app as an orchestration layer rather than a shrine to its own models, saying it may swap Nano Banana out over time, test different models with different users, and even use different models for different buttons, including its Firefly models later on. In other words, the future of mobile creativity looks like a model marketplace, not a monolith.
There are meaningful trade-offs. Because Nano Banana is cloud-based, AI Playground needs an internet connection and returns generated images at roughly 2K resolution to cut transmission and processing time. Edits are capped at 2K pixels, and they only work on photos shot inside Indigo. Current image generators output standard dynamic range, so Indigo has to lift those SDR edits back toward HDR with its own machine-learning step, and Adobe warns the result is not always accurate. Safety filters are strict: trigger them too often with prompts or images and you can be removed from the experiment. These constraints blunt some excitement, but they also reveal what “AI photo editing mobile” looks like in its first serious draft.
From phone-first creators to paid product: why this experiment matters
Indigo’s AI Playground is free for a small slice of users and only for a few weeks, and the feature requires sharing button-press telemetry—but not prompts or uploads—with Adobe. The company is frank: “we can’t offer it for free forever,” and if it proves popular, it will move to a paid version, potentially after more experiments and a wider rollout. This is not a toy; it is market research for the next generation of camera tools aimed squarely at people who treat their phone as both camera and studio.
That focus on phone-first creators explains the emphasis on guidance as much as on spectacle. Photo Guidance is not about surreal composites; it is about better composition and exposure tips while you are standing in front of the scene. The Nextcam team is also working on non-generative computational photography features that are planned to launch soon, signalling a belief that traditional algorithms and generative tricks will coexist rather than compete. In this sense, AI Playground is an argument: mobile photography should be less about filters after capture and more about intelligent assistants at the moment of capture.
A new contract between photographer and phone
Project Indigo’s AI Playground is opinionated software, and using it forces you to decide how much control you want to hand to the camera. For some, the ability to remove background clutter, apply a real-time image restyle, and get instant critique will feel like a creative upgrade. For others, it raises a concern: when the app is suggesting how to crop, when to reshoot, and what style to apply, whose taste is winning—the photographer’s or the model’s?
Yet the direction is clear. An AI photo editing mobile workflow that once meant exporting files to a desktop suite is now being compressed into a single timeline: shoot, edit, iterate, share, all inside one experimental Project Indigo camera app. As Adobe tests different models, prepares paid tiers, and readies more computational features, the real story is not the novelty of Nano Banana but the expectation it sets. Future cameras will not only capture reality; they will argue with you about how that reality should look. Photographers need to decide now whether they want that conversation—and how much they are willing to let the phone win.
