Adobe's Indigo Camera App Adds AI Editing Tools, But Skips Its Own AI Models

Key points

• Adobe updated its Indigo iPhone camera app to version 1.1 in 2025, adding AI editing tools called "AI Playground".
• The new tools run on Google's Nano Banana AI model, not Adobe's Firefly AI, which powers most of the company's other creative software.
• Adobe is testing free access with a small percentage of Indigo users, with no account sign-in required.
• Adobe fellow Marc Levoy says a paid version will follow if the experiment proves popular.
• Images edited with the new tools don't yet carry Adobe's standard AI-labelling metadata, though the company says it's working to add that.

Adobe's Indigo app started life as a camera tool for iPhone photographers who miss the hands-on feel of a traditional SLR, the kind with a big interchangeable lens you turn and click manually. Version 1.1, released this year, takes it somewhere different: generative AI editing, where software creates or removes parts of a photo rather than just adjusting brightness or colour.

The new section is called AI Playground. It has four tools. Styles applies AI-generated filter effects that can make a photo look like an illustration or shift its lighting mood. Object Editing removes people or distracting items from a background and fills the gap with generated scenery, similar to Google's Magic Eraser on Pixel phones. Photo Guidance analyses a shot and suggests how to reshoot or edit it. Custom Edit is a free-text tool: type a plain-English instruction such as "make the sky look stormy" and the AI attempts it.

Here's the notable part: Adobe's using Google's Nano Banana model to power these features, at least for now. Nano Banana is a compact AI model designed to run efficiently on devices like phones. That choice is striking because Adobe has spent years building its own Firefly AI models, trained on licensed images and marketed heavily as safe for commercial creative work. Adobe says it may swap in other models later.

Marc Levoy, an Adobe fellow who leads the Indigo project, described the rollout in an announcement blog as an experiment. A button inside the app lets users skip the AI tools entirely. Access is free, needs no account, and currently reaches only a small slice of users.

What does this mean for people who care about photo honesty?

Right now, photos edited with Indigo's AI tools don't automatically get labelled as AI-altered. Adobe normally attaches C2PA Content Credentials, a behind-the-scenes metadata tag that flags AI involvement, to images made with Firefly. Indigo doesn't do that yet. Google's Nano Banana model does embed an invisible SynthID watermark, a hidden digital signal detectable by specialist tools but not by the human eye. Levoy acknowledged the gap and said the team is working on adding the full credentials standard.

We first covered Indigo on 20 July 2026, when the app was still focused purely on SLR-style mobile photography.

Levoy was direct about where responsibility sits: "Whether the edits you apply are 'fair' or 'misleading' depend on what you do, who you share the images with, and how you present them."

For everyday users, the practical picture is simple. The update is free and easy to skip if you don't want it. If the experiment succeeds, a paid tier follows. Share edited photos publicly, and know that AI-altered content labels aren't in place yet. Adobe's decision to reach for a Google model rather than Firefly is what I'd watch most closely here: it suggests Firefly still isn't compact enough for on-device mobile work, which is a real limitation the company hasn't publicly addressed.