Adobe is rolling out a limited test today that gives select Project Indigo users access to several generative AI-powered photo-editing tools. Here are the details.
Adobe’s Project Indigo gets an experimental AI Playground #
A little more than a year ago, Adobe announced Project Indigo, a free experimental iPhone camera app offering full manual controls and a more natural, SLR-like approach to computational photography.
Last April, the company expanded Project Indigo to select iPads and the iPhone 17e, in an update that also introduced a new grid view, photo filtering, and several stability and image-quality improvements.
Today, Adobe is expanding Project Indigo’s toolset once again, with an AI Playground. Here’s Adobe:
Since Indigo is an experimental app, and this is an experiment inside Indigo, we’re offering the AI Playground for free, with no sign-on required. However, this level of free access will be available only to a few percent of our users, and only for a few weeks. Our goal is to learn how people use GenAI-powered editing. Depending on its success we may extend the experiment, or expand the user pool, or run follow-on experiments. If the feature proves popular, we will eventually offer a paid version.
If you’re among the users who get access to Project Indigo’s AI Playground, you’ll see a splash screen inviting you to join the experiment. Adobe says this is optional and, for users who opt in, the company will only collect button presses while using the Playground. This means Adobe “won’t look at your prompts, or images, or upload them to [its] servers, or use them to train AI models.” The company adds that “since there’s no sign-on, the analytics we gather are anonymous.”
Once the user gets access to Project Indigo’s AI Playground, they will see four new sections. Here is Adobe on each feature, accompanied by examples
Object Editing:“[…] the Object Editing section of our AI Playground contains buttons for distractor removal and defocusing the background to create a shallow depth of field. Within distractor removal is a list of toggles that allow you to remove one or more categories of distractors. You can also add categories by typing (or dictating) what you want removed, and you can save or delete these additions.”
Styles:“Most state-of-the-art GenAI models are capable of mimicking traditional artistic techniques. The Styles menu of our AI Playground contains buttons that will re-render your Indigo photo using a variety of techniques. The buttons we provide represent techniques we have found to be most successful when applied to everyday snapshots.”
Photo Guidance:“Many software products use AI to summarize or critique human-created documents, like email and résumés. We are exploring how to do something similar for photography – to help users learn or advance their photography. Since Indigo is a camera app, our AI analysis can provide both reshooting suggestions as well as editing suggestions.”
Custom Edit:“While our AI Playground provides buttons for many common generative editing operations, our Custom Edit button unlocks the full power of arbitrary text prompts. […] Our Styles buttons let you make photographs look like hand-drawn illustrations. Could we go the other way? The conversion of a drawing, painting, or sculpture into a photograph is not only fun; it’s also instructive. What could the artists have been looking at, which led to the piece they produced? […]”
Adobe says it is currently using Google’s Nano Banana model, which only outputs Standard Dynamic Range (SRD) images, even when the user snaps a shot in High Dynamic Range (HDR). For this reason, the company “built a custom ML model to post-process the standard dynamic range (SDR) images returned by Nano Banana, boosting them back to HDR.” Adobe adds that this is not perfect and relies heavily on the output Nano Banana produces.
One final note: the company explains that Project Indigo’s AI Playground features will only work on images captured with the app. This means that for images imported from elsewhere, the sparkle button that opens the AI Playground will be grayed out.
To learn more about Project Indigo’s AI Playground, follow this link.
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