Adobe’s Project Indigo camera app has gained a new AI Playground section with experimental photo editing tools. The free iPhone app serves as Adobe’s testing ground for features eventually headed to Lightroom and Camera Raw.
The AI Playground includes four tools: Object editing, which lets you select and modify specific elements within a photo; Custom edit, a freeform adjustment layer outside the standard preset structure; Photo critique, which provides automated feedback on composition and exposure; and Styles, which applies a set of aesthetic treatments to the image. None of these carry a Technology Preview label.
Project Indigo’s approach
Project Indigo is a free camera app built by Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, two engineers who worked on computational photography at Google from 2014 through 2020. Kainz was responsible for the night photography work that made Pixel cameras genuinely impressive. After leaving Google they landed at Adobe, where a team called Nextcam spent five years developing the app.
The core premise responds directly to over-processed smartphone photography: overly bright, low contrast, oversaturated, heavily smoothed and sharpened. Project Indigo takes a different path. For a single shot it combines up to 32 underexposed frames to reduce noise and preserve highlight detail. For digital zoom it captures multiple offset frames and uses real-world micro-shifts to build a sharper image, rather than letting AI fill in absent detail. The result is a natural image, not an Instagram-optimized one.
Recent additions beyond AI editing
The AI Playground is not the only recent addition. The April 2026 update was substantial:
- Grid view in the filmstrip with multi-selection for sharing or deleting photos
- Filtering of photos in the filmstrip and grid view
- 35mm equivalent focal length display for rear cameras
- DNG-only mode that defers JPEG rendering until you develop the photo in the filmstrip or Lightroom, making capture faster
- Long Exposure “infinite” capture that continuously merges frames until you stop it
- Support for iPhone 17e and iPads with at least 6GB of RAM
Device compatibility
Project Indigo runs on iPhone 12 and 13 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhone 14, 15, 16, and 17 series devices, plus the newly added iPad support. Adobe recommends an iPhone 15 Pro or newer for the best experience, which makes sense given how much the AI features lean on the Neural Engine. The app is free and requires no Adobe account.
On-device-only processing is the right choice for both privacy and speed. The Technology Preview label sets proper expectations, but if these tools land in Lightroom with the same quality, that’s a meaningful upgrade to a product people actually pay for.
Download Project Indigo from App Store
