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Indigo Playground: Critique & Fix
3 August 2026
We happened across a new Ferrari 296 GTB parked on the street this weekend on our way to buy some butterflake rolls for Sunday brunch. This is how worlds collide, we thought with some amusment. While we were carrying a credit card to the market, someone in the neighborhood parked half a million dollars at the curb.
Ferrari 296 GTB. We took Indigo's edits into Photoshop, Selected the Subject, Inverted the selection and knocked the Saturation way back to make the 'mundane' cars look less distracting.
On the way back, laden with butterflake rolls, we stopped to take a few pictures, thinking the Ferrari would make a beautiful Friday slide show.
But our iPhone was the only camera in our possession and despite Indigo's several focal length options, we found it hard to compose the shots we wanted from the sidewalk.
Camera Capture. We ran out of room backing up and shooting wide angle but at least we didn't crop the car.
Later, back at the ranch, we wondered if AI Playground could do what we could not. But first, we thought we'd ask it for a critique to see if it squirmed the same way we had.
WHAT'S WRONG
Here's what it came up with for this image:
Professional critique
Framing: The three-quarter front angle is standard and effective for automotive photography, showing both the face and profile. However, the crop is too tight at the bottom, nearly cutting off the front splitter. The background is cluttersome with mundane vehicles, distracting significantly from the exotic subject. A lower shooting angle might have helped impose more presence.
Lighting: The harsh midday sun is unforgiving. While it saturates the red paint, it creates severe specular highlights and glare on the windshield and hood, obscuring form and detail. The high contrast results in heavy, blocked-up shadows underneath the car. A circular polarizer was essential here to manage reflections.
Color: The Ferrari red is vibrant and dominates the frame, contrasting well with the neutral pavement. However, the blue and grey cars immediately behind it break the color harmony and draw the eye away.
Emotional Impact: The image captures a beautiful machine, but the mundane setting and snapshot lighting rob it of drama. It feels like a casual spot rather than a curated photograph, lessening the sense of luxury and speed the car represents.
The first (defensive) thing we'll say is that it's a little unrealistic to complain about the background of "mundane vehicles." It's a street shot not a studio shot. And the streets are always full of nothing but mundane vehicles. It's a city, man.
Second, yep, it was midday sun all right. You take what you can get when the occasion presents itself. The sun is not a studio light.
We grant we had cropped too close. It was the best we could do on the sidewalk.
But apart from failing to appreciate the context (perhaps stunned by the beauty of the vehicle), we couldn't quibble with the finer points of the critique.
FIX IT
So we thought we might ask AI Playground to fix a couple of those problems with the image.
We started with the crop. We asked Playground to "Enlarge the canvase 10%." And it did, filling in the new space cleverly aware of the context. And even adding some rooftops and sky.
So we sent that revision back for another, asking Playground to "Remove the spectral highlight on the windshield." And, behold, a miracle happened.
Two Edits. A little breathing room and less glare on the windshield.
We stopped there, quite happy with the improvements.
But the experience confirmed (and expressed) what we didn't like about the cramped image and also managed to improve on it.
We took the edited image into Photoshop and did a few more tweaks (recropping and knocking down the saturation of the background) just to finish the job. That's the image at the top.
As an illustration of a beautiful car parked in on a city street, this works fine. If we were a photojournalist, though, we'd have to go with the original version. That's how we'd slice that pizza.
A NOTE
A weekend update to Indigo has extended the AI Playground offer. Using the Test Flight app, you can download a version that accesses the Playground.