Adobe's awesome Pixel Camera-ish iPhone app is getting even better

Last year, Adobe launched an iPhone camera app built by a team that included two of the minds behind the popular Pixel Camera app. The app, called “Project Indigo,” offers a bunch of useful features, including manual controls and the HDR+ approach of the original Google Camera to capture photos with better dynamic range. Now, Adobe is introducing some impressive new features in the app.

Adobe today announced in a blog post that it’s adding an “AI Playground” to the Project Indigo camera app. This is an experimental feature that uses Google’s Nano Banana model, but the company says it could switch models in the future, or even offer different models to different users as a kind of A/B test.

AI Playground in the Project Indigo app brings four features: object editing, photo styles, photo guidance, and custom edit. Object editing offers buttons for object categories that can be used to remove those objects from the image. It also supports a “Custom Edit” option that lets users type what they want to remove. In an example shared by Adobe, Custom Edit is used to remove the fog obscuring the Golden Gate Bridge, and Project Indio removes the fog and generates the rest of the bridge, along with the city of San Francisco in the background.

“Photo Styles” is a fairly self-explanatory feature and includes styles like “Pen and Ink,” “Ink line with color wash,” and “Golden hour lighting.” The Custom Edit feature, meanwhile, offers the most flexibility while editing. It can be used to convert images to hand-drawn illustrations in the style of, say, Da Vinci. However, it can also be used to convert illustrations into images, or statues into photos of people.

Perhaps more interesting than any of these is the new “Photo Guidance” feature. With this, Project Indigo uses AI to critique your photos and offer helpful advice on reshooting them for better results or editing them for the best final output. The company is also working to improve the feature by introducing suggestions for cropping and composition.

AI Playground in Project Indigo is available as a free experiment to a small fraction of users for a few weeks. Adobe says it will analyze how the experiment performs in users’ hands and use that data to decide whether to offer it as a full-fledged feature within the app. The company could also offer a paid version in the future.