A new experimental "AI Playground" in Adobe's iPhone camera app critiques your framing, lighting, color, and emotional impact, then lets you remove distractions, fake depth of field, restyle, and edit by natural-language prompt — running on Google's Nano Banana model.
2026-07-20 · by Moe Ameen
Adobe added an experimental feature called AI Playground to Project Indigo, its free iPhone camera app, bringing an AI photo critic and a set of generative editing tools directly into the shooting-and-review flow. The update was reported across the photography press on July 20, 2026, including TechCrunch, PetaPixel, DPReview, and Engadget. Project Indigo is a computational photography app built by Adobe's Nextcam team (which includes former Google camera lead Marc Levoy); it launched over a year earlier with manual controls, multi-frame noise reduction, and upscaling, and this is its first push into generative AI.
AI Playground is organized into four sections. Object Editing removes distractions — toggles for people, trash, wires, and vehicles, plus a custom-object option — and can add a simulated shallow depth-of-field blur. Styles applies stylistic transfers such as watercolor, pen-and-ink, and monochrome looks. Custom Edit takes a natural-language prompt for adjustments that aren't covered by a preset. Photo Guidance is the critique layer.
The Photo Critique tool reviews a shot and returns a professional-style assessment of its framing and composition, lighting, color, and overall emotional impact, calling out issues like distracting elements near the edge of the frame. It pairs that with practical suggestions split into two kinds: how to re-shoot the scene on the spot (recompose, adjust exposure, remove an object before you press the shutter) and how to edit the frame afterward. Adobe positions it as a way to learn and improve, not just to fix a single photo.
The tools run on Google's "Nano Banana," a Gemini-based image model that is cloud-based and needs an active internet connection. Because Nano Banana outputs standard-dynamic-range images, Adobe says it built a custom machine-learning model to convert results back to HDR. Adobe also says it plans to mix in other models over time, including its own Firefly. Availability is deliberately limited: AI Playground is free for now but is rolling out to only a few percent of Project Indigo users and only for a few weeks. No sign-in is required, and Adobe says it collects anonymous analytics on which buttons are pressed while explicitly not accessing prompts or images or using them to train models. If the feature proves popular, Adobe says it will eventually offer a paid version.
Project Indigo's AI Playground makes the raw photo better — it tells you the framing is weak, cleans a pole out of the background, adds depth of field — but it hands you back a single, better still on your phone. Kompozy is what turns that still into a published week. Because Kompozy is a content generation and publishing engine, you take the shot Indigo helped you nail and drop it in as the seed: it generates Photo Posts and Infographic Photos around it, spins the idea into a Carousel Post, a Quote Graphic, a Text Post, a Blog Article, and a Newsletter, keeps every piece in your voice via the Persona Brief, then schedules and publishes the set across nine social platforms plus your blog and email from one queue. Indigo improves the input; Kompozy is the output engine that gets it everywhere, on-brand, on schedule.
Be honest about the seam: Indigo is an iPhone capture-and-critique app, and Kompozy doesn't shoot or critique photos on your camera — it takes finished images and ideas and produces the multi-format, multi-platform content around them, including net-new video (persona/avatar shorts, clips, VFX hooks) that a camera app can't make at all. The two sit at opposite ends of the same pipeline: use Indigo's critique to walk away with a stronger frame, then let Kompozy do the part Indigo never touches — turning one good photo into a full run of posts across every channel you publish to.
AI Playground is an experimental feature in Adobe's free Project Indigo iPhone camera app that adds an AI photo critic plus generative editing. It has four parts: Object Editing (remove distractions, add depth of field), Styles (style transfers), Custom Edit (natural-language prompt edits), and Photo Guidance, which critiques a shot's framing, lighting, color, and emotional impact and suggests how to re-shoot or edit it.
The AI Playground tools run on Google's "Nano Banana," a Gemini-based image model that is cloud-based and requires an internet connection. Because it outputs standard-dynamic-range images, Adobe built a custom model to convert results back to HDR. Adobe says it plans to add other models over time, including its own Firefly.
For now it is free and requires no sign-in, but it is an experiment gated to only a few percent of Project Indigo users and only for a few weeks. Adobe says that if the feature proves popular it will eventually offer a paid version.
Yes. Indigo critiques and cleans one still on your iPhone; it does not publish it. Kompozy takes that finished photo as a seed and generates the surrounding content — Photo Posts, carousels, quote graphics, a blog, a newsletter, text posts — keeps it on-brand via the Persona Brief, and schedules and publishes it across nine social platforms plus blog and email.