Adobe’s ‘natural look’ camera app embraces generative AI

Project Indigo started life as a straight-shooter's app, the kind of tool built for people who care about ISO settings and shutter speed rather than filters. Now Adobe is bolting a generative AI suite onto it called AI Playground, and the twist is that it doesn't lean on Adobe's own Firefly models to do it. Instead, the company is turning to Google's Nano Banana model, at least for now, with Adobe fellow Marc Levoy saying they may add or swap models later.

The update, version 1.1, splits into four sections. Styles slaps AI-generated filter effects onto photos, turning them into illustrations or messing with lighting. Object Editing strips out unwanted people or clutter from the background and fills the gap with generative AI, functionally similar to Google's Magic Eraser. Photo Guidance acts like a coach, analyzing your shots and suggesting reshoots or edits. And Custom Edit is the catch-all prompt box, letting you type out exactly what you want changed if the presets don't cut it.

Adobe is framing this as a genuine experiment rather than a finished feature. It's rolling out free, with no sign-in required, to a small slice of Indigo users over the coming weeks, and there's an opt-out button for anyone who just wants the old, filter-free experience back. Levoy says the goal is to learn how people actually use GenAI editing tools before deciding whether to expand access or eventually charge for it.

What's notable is how far this pulls Indigo from its original pitch. The app launched as, in the words of The Verge's Allison Johnson, something "built by camera nerds for camera nerds," leaning on computational photography to mimic SLR image quality while still offering manual controls. But Levoy hinted even at launch that Indigo was meant to evolve into an integrated camera-and-editing experience built around computational photography and AI, so this pivot may have been the plan all along rather than a sudden swerve.

The one place Adobe seems to be moving slower than usual is transparency. The company is typically strict about labeling AI-generated content through its C2PA Content Credentials system, already baked into Firefly. Here, that labeling isn't fully in place yet, though Levoy says the team is working on adding it, and notes that Nano Banana already stamps images with Google's invisible SynthID watermark. Levoy's own framing is refreshingly blunt: whether an edit counts as fair or misleading, he says, comes down to what you do with it and how you present it, not the tool itself.