Adobe’s Project Indigo Camera App Will Now Critique Your Photos Like an Art Teacher

You know that little pang you feel when you look back at a photo and something's just off? The lamp growing out of someone's head, the exposure that's a touch too flat, the great subject buried in a busy frame. You can feel that the shot isn't working, even when you can't say why. Adobe's Project Indigo now wants to say why for you.

The experimental iOS camera app is testing a new tab called AI Playground, and it does two things that are more interesting together than apart: it edits your photos with generative AI, and it critiques them like a patient art teacher looking over your shoulder. That second part is the one worth paying attention to.

A camera app that talks back

Tap into AI Playground and Indigo will actually assess your photo: the framing, the lighting, the colors, even its emotional impact. Then it offers a plan. Sometimes that's advice on reshooting, telling you to adjust your framing or fix the exposure or lose a distracting object before you press the shutter again. Sometimes it's a set of edits to apply after the fact. This is the part that separates it from the usual pile of AI photo tools. Most of them hand you a text box and expect you to conjure the perfect prompt, and as Marc Levoy, the researcher leading the project, points out, finding that perfect prompt is genuinely tricky. Indigo tries to meet you where you are instead: it looks at the picture and suggests the fix, rather than making you describe it.

What it can actually do to a photo

The editing side is stocked with the kind of tools you'd expect from Adobe, minus the sprawling desktop interface. There's object removal with toggles for the usual culprits: people, trash, wires, poles, fences, cars, and other clutter, plus a field for describing something more specific you want gone. There's artificial depth of field, the software blur that fakes the creamy background of a proper portrait lens. There's style transfer, so you can push a shot toward watercolor, pen and ink, monochrome, or a backlit look. And if none of the presets fit, you can just type out the edit you want in plain language.

Under the hood, this runs on Google's Nano Banana model, the same Gemini-based image tech that's been making the rounds lately. That means it's cloud-based: no internet, no AI Playground. Edited images are also capped at 2K pixels to keep things quick, which is fine for sharing and less fine if you were hoping to print big. Adobe says it's open to swapping in other models down the road, including its own Firefly, so the Google dependency may not be permanent.

The catch, and the fine print

Here's where the enthusiasm needs a skeptical edge. AI Playground is a test, not a product. It's live for only a small slice of Project Indigo users, iPhone only, for just a few weeks. It's free right now, but Adobe hasn't promised it'll stay that way or said what it might cost if it graduates into something permanent. Treat this as a look at where Indigo is headed, not a feature you can count on tomorrow.

There's also a genuinely odd warning buried in the details: trip the AI model's safety filters too many times, whether from what's in your photo or what you type into a prompt, and Adobe can boot you out of the test entirely. It's a reminder that when the smarts live on someone else's servers, you're playing by someone else's rules.

Still, the idea underneath all this is the good kind of clever. A camera that doesn't just capture the moment but helps you understand why a shot works or doesn't is genuinely useful, especially for the person who takes a lot of photos and has never quite figured out what separates theirs from the ones they admire. That's who this is for: not the pro who already knows the rules, but the enthusiast who wants a second opinion in their pocket. Whether Adobe keeps it free, or keeps it at all, is the question that decides if this stays a neat experiment or becomes the reason you reach for Indigo instead of the stock camera.