Adobe's Project Indigo Embraces AI, Leaving SLR Purists Behind

Adobe’s Project Indigo started as a love letter to smartphone photographers seeking that coveted natural SLR aesthetic. But the company’s Nextcam Team has other ideas now. The experimental camera app is getting a major overhaul centered around generative AI, signaling a significant shift in philosophy that’s bound to divide the photography community.

The new AI Playground feature promises to fundamentally change how mobile photographers approach their craft. Rather than chasing that elusive optical quality that made Project Indigo appealing in the first place, Adobe is doubling down on computational photography and AI-assisted editing at the moment of capture.

What’s Actually New Here

The initial version of AI Playground comes with four distinct sections, each powered by generative AI. Object Editing lets you remove unwanted distractions like people, cars, or street signs with a tap. You can also blur backgrounds to simulate shallow depth of field, which is something smartphone photographers have desperately wanted for years. The Styles section takes things further, transforming snapshots into drawings or paintings with options like “pen and ink” or “ink line with color wash.”

Then there’s Photo Guidance, arguably the most interesting feature. It critiques your photos and offers suggestions before you even take your next shot. Imagine having a photography mentor in your pocket who tells you what’s wrong with your framing or composition in real time. The Custom Edit section gives you even more granular control through text prompts, letting you describe what you want and having AI reshape the image accordingly.

Adobe is currently using Google’s Nano Banana model to power these features, though the company isn’t locking itself into that choice. The flexibility suggests Adobe wants to experiment with different AI approaches as the technology evolves.

The Price Tag Question

Here’s where things get murky. AI Playground is free right now, but with significant limitations. Adobe is only offering access to “a few percent of our users, and only for a few weeks.” This is classic experimental software rollout strategy, but it also hints at what’s coming next.

The Nextcam Team was refreshingly candid about future pricing: “we can’t offer it for free forever.” If AI Playground becomes popular, expect a paid tier. That’s not shocking in today’s software landscape, especially when we’ve seen tech companies monetize AI features across the board. But it does raise questions about accessibility and whether computational photography improvements should be premium features.

The Bigger Picture

This pivot reveals something important about Adobe’s vision for mobile photography. The company isn’t interested in perfecting the hardware-software marriage to achieve optical excellence. Instead, it’s betting big that photographers want AI assistance and creative transformation tools more than they want authentic image quality. It’s a bet worth watching.

Does this mean the original vision for Project Indigo is dead? Not necessarily. But it’s clear Adobe sees the future of smartphone photography as collaborative between human intent and machine intelligence. Whether that future excites or horrifies you probably depends on how you approach photography in the first place.

The photography world has always been divided between purists and pragmatists. Project Indigo used to appeal to both. Now, it’s clearly targeting the pragmatists who want their camera app to do as much creative heavy lifting as possible. The purists might want to look elsewhere.

Source: Adobe’s Project Indigo announcement via the Nextcam Team blog

Will AI-assisted photography eventually become so seamless that we stop caring whether an image was captured or computed?