Adobe's Project Indigo Camera App Integrates Generative AI Tools

Adobe's Project Indigo camera app may be drifting away from its original appeal to smartphone photographers looking for a "natural SLR-like look." Instead, Adobe's Nextcam Team is adding a bunch of generative AI tools to its Project Indigo experimental camera app that it introduced last year. The team behind Project Indigo said the goal "is to explore how generative AI can assist mobile photographers at the point of capture."

Called AI Playground, the initial version will offer four sections, Object Editing, Styles, Photo Guidance and Custom Edit, each of which allows users to lean on AI assistance through several buttons or toggles. In Object Editing, you can remove distractions like people, cars or signs and blur the background to mimic a more shallow depth of field. For the Styles section, Project Indigo can radically alter a snapshot by converting it with buttons like "pen and ink" or "ink line with color wash" to resemble drawings or paintings. With Photo Guidance, the app will dish out a critique of a photo and even offer suggestions before you take your next shot. As the name suggests, the Custom Edit feature will offer users even more control through prompts, as seen with an example that alters a picture of a lantern to have it appear on a mountain ledge with sunlight hitting it from the right of the frame.