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A First Test of Indigo's AI Playground
24 July 2026
Just after we mentioned the Project Indigo update hadn't provided us access to AI Playground, which it is randomly allowing, Adobe offered us access.
Color Negative Conversion. After editing in Adobe Camera Raw.
We'd thought the company had wanted to avoid allowing the press access because, well, we'd skew the results of the experiment by running the thing day and night.
Anticipating the magic would in fact sparkle for us after all, we thought about what we'd actually do with it. Specifically, what we would do with it. Because, you know, it does a lot of things.
Too bad, we thought right away, that it doesn't offer conversions of negatives you can easily scan with your phone. We recently did a bunch of these in Lightroom, using two plug-ins (one for black-and-white, one for color) to convert the capture into a positive, as we explained a while ago.
That works but it's cumbersome. By which we mean too much tapping.
GEMINI
So the other day, we thought we'd ask Google Gemini's macOS app to do it for us. "Convert to positive," we typed after uploading a color negative capture from the 1960s.
And it did. But it was horrendous. Really, really terrible. The four gents in the photo were dressed in matching outfits but Gemini only let two of them match. While changing some facial features. It even gave three of the kids white hair.
Really.
So, waiting for AI Playground, we were bummed that it did fancy stuff like distraction removal and critiques but there was no automatic negative conversion.
After all, our Lightroom plug-ins gave us an accurate positive image so an Adobe AI approach should be better informed than the Google attempt. Right?
Then it struck us.
We can do it the same way we did it in Gemini. Using AI Playground's Custom Prompt.
DIY WITH A PROMPT
So we opened the same Indigo negative capture we gave to Gemini and typed the same prompt to convert it to a positive.
We did hesitate a minute about the prompt. Should we tell it that it's a color negative? Should we explain we want a color positive?
But our better nature (the lazy part) won out. We just told it (you don't have to tap, you can speak the prompt) to make a positive of the thing.
We were simply astonished at the result.
First, we have to point out that this was a difficult image to convert to begin with. Which is why we picked it for this test.
There are the flesh tones, of course, but the shirts were a problem too, being dark and shiny. We never quite got all that right in our edit of the Lightroom capture.
A BETTER POSITIVE
The goal of our Lightroom plug-ins was merely to make a negative image into a positive one so we could see what the photo depicted. We didn't expect the plug-in to optimize the positive. It's hard to see how a general purpose plug-in could optimize a particular image, in fact.
So we always expected to edit the positives in Photoshop, and even then, with decades of editing experience, we didn't always get where we wanted to go. Often we fell short of a contemporary image, satisfied with a 1960s snapshot.
Which, after all, is what the photo actually was. An Instamatic capture, probably. But we had wanted to bring it to life.
The truth is that older black-and-white (and often studio) portraits hold up a lot better than the early color images of the 20th century. And now that a new generation is tasked with saving the family archives from extinction, there's some even more reason to make those color negative conversions raise their game.
And if that takes artificial intelligence, we're in.
We should point out that, like the Lightroom plug-in, the Indigo conversion happens in the camera but, in this case, within the same app. We should have been able to do that in Lightroom, but focus was an issue so we used Indigo for the captures (which is why we were able to use the old capture with AI Playground).
That's really convenient. You know, less tapping.
You can see for yourself how well AI Playground did in the comparison above, very close to our final edit.
But, as we said, we were simply astonished. In a good way for once.
