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Indigo Playground: Watercolor
31 July 2026
Among the styles Indigo's AI Playground offers is Watercolor. As long-time admirers of Harold Davis's iPhone watercolor renderings, we've wanted to find a phone-based way to render images as if they were painted that way.
Indigo AI Watercolor. This is a crop at 100 percent so you can see the rendering in detail.
So we looked forward to trying the Watercolor style in Indigo's AI Playground. The trouble was finding an image that would work as a watercolor.
But Joyce's orchid in the front window came to the rescue, popping a couple of new blooms open for us. We took a photo of it texted it to her. Then we thought, this might make a nice watercolor.
We didn't even have to get out of our chair.
There's a lot to admire in this watercolor rendering but at 500 pixels, it isn't immediately obvious. In fact, it wasn't easy to appreciate on the iPhone screen. We rather dismissed it to make dinner, which rewarded our efforts with a bit more enjoyment.
OOPS
But we were mistaken. When we looked at the watercolor rendering on our computer, we appreciated the subtle drawing, the faithful tonalities, the nailed-it color and adroit handling of transparency. But what we really enjoyed was the background rendering of the house across the street.
When we composed the photo, we aimed the lens upwards to avoid the street scene and set the flowers against the tree tops and the neutral house across the way. They were all slightly out of focus since we were shooting in macro mode.
And the watercolor rendering seemed to grasp the significance of that, highlighting with precision the blooms in the foreground and softening the background.
Compare, for example, the balustrade on the top floor of the house to the green spikes coming out of the bottom right of the vase. They are handled quite differently.
The image at the top shows a 100 percent crop of the watercolor rendering so you can appreciate the detail that the thumbnail above can't show.
OPTIONS
We're used to fiddling around with Photoshop's watercolor filter's options. They include Brush Detail, Shadow Intensity and Texture. So we thought that's what is missing from the Watercolor style in Indigo as we considered the image on our iPhone screen.
But looking at the image on a computer monitor, we're not sure how we'd change it.
So we ran the full resolution image through the Photoshop filter to see what we might have done to the iPhone photo if Indigo had provided a few sliders to tweak the watercolor effect.
We were astonished, frankly.
The Photoshop filter looked more like a photograph than a watercolor, although we could certainly see some attempt was made to imitate the effect. The Indigo style was much more like a painting than a photograph.
We'd tried to mimic Indigo's style with the options available to the Photoshop effect but we didn't get very close. You can see the difference for yourself.
We'd call it a little bit more ... intelligent.
And the interesting thing is that in this first version of Indigo's AI Playground, the intelligence is being provided by Google's Nano Banana. Other models may be available in future versions, giving us something more interesting to play with than mere sliders.
