Adobe's experimental iPhone camera app that critiques your photo and edits it with generative AI.
Last verified · 2026-07-20 · by Moe Ameen
Adobe Project Indigo is a free, experimental iPhone camera app from Adobe's research team, first released in 2025 with pro manual controls, multi-frame super-resolution, and computational capture modes. On July 20, 2026, Adobe added an "AI Playground" tab that bundles two new kinds of AI help: a photo critique that gives you an opinion on a shot, and a set of generative editing tools that change the image.
The critique lives in a section Adobe calls Photo Guidance. Point it at a photo and it returns a professional-style read on framing, lighting, color, and emotional impact — the good points and the bad — plus concrete next steps. If you are still at the scene, it tells you how to reshoot: adjust the framing, change exposure, or move an object out of the frame. If the moment has passed, it suggests post-capture edits instead. Adobe tuned it for phone reality, so it will not tell you to stop down the aperture or reach for an optical zoom the phone does not have. It is best understood as a critique of a frame you have taken, with a reshoot path when you are still on location, rather than a live overlay that grades the scene before you press the shutter.
The AI Playground has four sections. Object Editing removes distractions — people, wires, poles, trash, fences, vehicles, or anything you describe — and can add a shallow depth-of-field blur to the background. Styles restyles the photo as a pen-and-ink drawing, a painterly ink-and-color-wash look, or a backlit/golden-hour look. Photo Guidance is the critique. Custom Edit takes an open-ended text prompt for edits that do not fit a preset. Under the hood the generative work currently runs on Google's Nano Banana model rather than Adobe's own Firefly, and the critiques use large language models; Adobe says it may swap models over time or give different models to different buttons or users — potentially including one of its own Firefly models, which it notes are especially good at distractor removal.
Two honest caveats. It is a test, not a shipping product: at launch it was free to only a small percentage of users for a few weeks, and Adobe says the features might never reach a wider audience. Access requires sharing analytics, though Adobe states your prompts and images stay private. And it is a capture-and-edit tool on a single phone — it makes one photo better; it does not turn that photo into finished, scheduled posts.
Project Indigo's AI Playground is a frame perfecter. The critique pushes you toward a stronger composition, the generative tools clean the distractions and restyle the result, and you walk away with one polished photo. What it never does is turn that photo into a post — let alone the dozen posts a week a real content calendar needs. That multiplication and distribution is the job Kompozy is built for. Drop the edited Indigo shot into Kompozy as a source and the engine spins it into a whole content unit: a captioned Photo Post, a quote graphic, a brand-exact carousel rendered through HyperFrames, and platform-native text posts written in your own voice through your Persona Brief.
Then Kompozy covers the last mile Indigo leaves untouched. It reframes each piece to the right aspect ratio per destination, burns in branded captions, and schedules and publishes across all nine supported platforms — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, Threads — plus email and blog, from one review queue with autopilot. So the split is clean: Indigo gets a single frame right on the phone, and Kompozy turns that frame into a multi-format, multi-platform week instead of one upload you still have to design, caption, and post by hand.
It is a feature tab Adobe added to its experimental iPhone camera app, Project Indigo, on July 20, 2026. It bundles a photo critique (Photo Guidance) that comments on framing, lighting, color, and emotional impact, plus generative editing tools that remove distractions, add depth of field, restyle the image, and run custom text-prompt edits.
Not as a live overlay. The Photo Guidance critique reads a photo you have captured and gives good and bad points. If you are still at the scene it suggests how to reshoot — adjust framing, exposure, or remove an object from frame — and otherwise it suggests post-capture edits. It is tuned for phone limits, so it will not recommend aperture or optical-zoom changes a phone cannot make.
Adobe says the generative editing currently runs on Google's Nano Banana model rather than its own Firefly, and the critiques use large language models. Adobe notes it may swap models over time or use different models for different buttons or users — potentially including one of its own Firefly models, which it says are especially good at distractor removal.
No. At launch it was a test released free to only a small percentage of Project Indigo users for a few weeks, and Adobe says the features might never reach a wider audience. Access requires sharing analytics, though Adobe states your prompts and images remain private.
Indigo perfects and edits a single frame but does not publish. Bring the finished photo into Kompozy to fan it into a Photo Post, quote graphic, carousel, and text posts in your voice, then caption, reframe, schedule, and publish across nine platforms from one queue.