Adobe Project Indigo updated with live photo coaching: smarter edits arrive on iPhone

Adobe has updated Project Indigo, its Adobe Labs camera app for iPhone, with a new feature called Playground that adds generated edits and live coaching while you shoot.

Project Indigo first showed up in June 2025 as an Adobe Labs release, built with help from former Google Pixel Camera engineers. The pitch is pretty specific: photos that look more natural and a little closer to what you’d expect from an SLR, rather than the glossy, overprocessed look a lot of phone camera apps tend to produce.

Playground can remove objects, apply artistic styles, and handle other AI-generated edits. The more interesting part, though, is the photo critique tool. It can flag issues with composition, framing, lighting, and subject placement while you’re still lining up the shot, instead of waiting until afterward and trying to patch things up in editing.

According to Adobe, this is a limited-time experiment rolling out to a small, randomly selected group of Project Indigo users. Right now it runs on Google’s Nano Banana image model, not Adobe Firefly. Adobe also hasn’t said whether Playground will remain inside Project Indigo or eventually show up in a more widely used app like Lightroom Mobile.

If you already use Project Indigo on your iPhone and like the idea of a camera app that teaches as you shoot, this is one to watch, even if access hasn’t reached you yet.

Project Indigo is available on iPhone through Adobe Labs.