Adobe has added a set of AI-powered features to Project Indigo, its experimental iPhone camera app, including a tool that critiques your photos in real time by evaluating framing, lighting, colors, and emotional impact (TechCrunch).

Project Indigo launched in 2025 under the direction of Marc Levoy, who leads the project at Adobe. The app works as a testing ground on iOS for new photography ideas that rely on software to improve pictures rather than just camera hardware. The new features, reported by TechCrunch on July 20, 2026, push the app into new territory by combining help while you are taking a photo with AI editing after you have taken it.

The critique feature goes beyond basic technical information like exposure settings. It gives AI-generated opinions on how well a photo is composed, how the colors work, and what Adobe calls emotional impact — how the photo makes you feel. Alongside the critique, the app offers suggestions that guide users on adjusting framing, exposure, and objects visible on screen before they take the shot. The difference between the two is important: critique judges what you have already done, while suggestion coaches you in real time before you press the shutter.

Object removal is the most detailed of the new additions. Project Indigo provides preset toggles for common photographic distractions: people in the background, trash and trash cans, wires and poles, fences, vehicles, and a catch-all category for other clutter. Users can also describe a custom object they want removed, pointing Adobe's AI at a specific target rather than relying on the preset categories.

A depth-of-field feature simulates blurred backgrounds, the kind of effect you usually get with a professional camera and an expensive lens. Smartphone makers have been doing something similar with portrait mode for years, but putting it inside Adobe's camera app means the effect can be applied with more precise subject detection and at a point in the process where Adobe controls the entire image pipeline.

Style transfer rounds out the feature set. Available styles include watercolor, pen and ink, ink line with color wash, monochromatic, and backlit subject. These are applied as AI re-renderings of the captured image rather than as simple filter overlays, meaning the AI essentially repaints the photo in the chosen style.

Taken together, the feature set positions Project Indigo as something other than a regular camera app. The critique and suggestion features put an AI advisor into the shooting process. Object removal and depth-of-field generation bring editing tools normally found on a computer into the moment you take the photo. Style transfer extends the process into AI-powered reinterpretation.

In my view, the critique feature raises a concern worth thinking about. Evaluating "emotional impact" is a subjective, artistic judgment, not a technical one, and putting it into a camera app raises questions about what standard the AI uses to make those calls and whether it pushes users toward a sameness in how photos look. Adobe has not explained the training data or the criteria behind the critique model.

The object removal presets also reflect assumptions about what counts as visual clutter. Trash cans and utility poles are normal urban scenery for street photographers; a preset that removes them by default nudges users toward a cleaned-up visual style. The ability to toggle these categories individually gives the user control, but the list of categories itself encodes choices about what belongs in a photo.

Adobe's decision to put these capabilities into an experimental app rather than a flagship product fits with how the company has historically tested new photography features before deciding whether they move into Lightroom or Photoshop. The app's existence under Marc Levoy's direction signals serious investment, and the feature set as a whole suggests Adobe is exploring how much of the traditional photo editing workflow can be moved into the moment of capture.

For anyone watching how AI and photography are coming together, Project Indigo's new capabilities offer an early look at where Adobe sees the camera app heading: not just a capture tool, but an AI-guided path from viewfinder to finished image.