Project Indigo will have new features like removing distractions and offering immediate photo feedback.

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.

Adobe's Nextcam Team said it's currently using Google's Nano Banana model to run its AI Playground, but could switch to other AI models in the future. AI Playground in Project Indigo is currently free, but Adobe is limiting the availability to "a few percent of our users, and only for a few weeks." Depending on the features' success, the team behind AI Playground said it may extend the availability or offer access to more users. However, the Adobe Nextcam team said on its website that "we can't offer it for free forever," and "if the feature proves popular, we will eventually offer a paid version."