Adobe's 'natural look' camera Indigo adopts generative AI

Camera purists have spent the last few years complaining that smartphones make photos look synthetic and over-processed.

That was precisely the problem Adobe’s Nextcam team set out to fix last year with Project Indigo, an experimental iPhone camera app built "by camera nerds for camera nerds." It focused on computational photography that mimics natural SLR optics, paired with manual controls for shutter speed, ISO, and white balance.

Now, Adobe is pivoting in a surprising direction. With its version 1.1 update, Indigo is adding a full suite of generative AI tools.

A playground for camera nerds

The new toolset, dubbed "AI Playground," is split into four distinct sections: Styles, Object Editing, Photo Guidance, and Custom Edit.

According to Adobe fellow Marc Levoy, each section contains buttons or toggles wired to engineered prompts. Tap a button, and the app generates a fresh edit; tap it again, and you usually get a slightly different variation.

Styles applies generative artistic filters and lighting tweaks. Object Editing functions like Google's Magic Eraser, wiping away unwanted people or background clutter and filling in the gaps with generative content.

The standout feature might be Photo Guidance, an AI feedback system that critiques your shot and suggests composition fixes or reshoots. For granular tweaks, Custom Edit lets users type natural-language prompts to refine what the preset missed.

Borrowing Google's brain

Here is the twist: instead of relying on its proprietary Firefly models, Adobe built this update on Google's Nano Banana model "to start." Adobe says it may swap or support other models down the road.

The feature is currently in free testing with a small group of Indigo users for a few weeks, requiring no account sign-in. If users find it valuable, Adobe may eventually roll it into a paid offering.

Crucially, users who hate generative edits can toggle the feature off completely and keep Indigo as a clean, manual camera app.

The update also takes an uncharacteristically relaxed approach to transparency. While Adobe usually champions C2PA Content Credentials to tag AI imagery, the Indigo team is still working on adding that metadata support. For now, it relies solely on Google's invisible SynthID watermarks.

Why it matters

We think this release signals a very pragmatic shift inside Adobe.

Passing over its own Firefly models in favor of Google's Nano Banana suggests that mobile speed, lightweight latency, and experimentation trumped corporate model pride. It is a rare admission that third-party specialized models might be better suited for quick mobile tasks right now.

For creators, Photo Guidance is the real sleeper hit. Instead of just fixing a ruined photo after the fact, turning the AI into a real-time photo coach that tells you how to frame the next shot could genuinely help people take better pictures.

That said, Adobe is playing with fire on the optics front. Indigo earned a cult following by championing natural, optical purity over algorithmic sludge. Injecting cartoonish style filters and prompt boxes risks alienating its core audience—even if the opt-out switch buys them some goodwill.