S E E A L S O
Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Indigo Playground: Pen and Wash
27 July 2026
Our second stab at Project Indigo's AI Playground also scratched an old itch. And that itch was photographing our orchid where we keep it. That's in the front window.
Seen from the room, though, that backlights the orchid. Which makes for a lovely view if you are a human being but a difficult problem for a camera. As a human being you can ignore the background of the street and the cars parked there but as a wide angle lens, nope.
So we've given up trying to get a good photo there and move the plant when we want to photograph it.
Until the other day when we grabbed the phone, launched Indigo, picked a focal length and clicked on the Macro button and took a shot.
It was really horrible. The background had a magenta cast over the burned out street scene and even the orchid looked dark and dreary. We'd never do anything with an image like that. It was visual garbage.
STYLES
But we thought we'd try Indigo's AI Playground on it. In this case, we wanted to convert the photo to a drawing. So we took a look at the Styles available.
There are several:
- Watercolor to transform the image into a watercolor painting
- Pen and ink to transform the photo into a pen and ink illustration
- Ink line with color wash combines detailed ink lines with watercolor washes to create vibrant, structured sketches
- Vintage uses soft film green and warm tones evoke 1970s film photography
- Monochromatic to convert to monochrome with rich contrast
- B&W with color accent adds a color accent on interesting parts of the photo
- Backlit subject creates a backlighting effect around the subject
- Golden hour lighting adds a beautiful golden hour lighting effect to the image
- Cinematic creates a wide-format cinematic rendition
We went with "Ink line with color wash." And you can see how that transformation saved the image. We used Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill to remove some confusion in the background for the top image, but that was all the editing we did.
You can apply one style over another, too. For example, after we applied the pen and wash style, we applied the Golden hour style. It didn't add anything to the image, though, so we just canceled it rather than save it.
Indigo saves the edits of the camera image as a separate file so you have both the original and the edit.
A NEW WAY OF SEEING
But now that we have a camera that can generate that sort of image, we're going to start seeing things that way.
Far from being a gimmick, AI Playground is expanding what a camera app can do in ways traditional cameras haven't even begun to think about.
