S E E A L S O
Indigo Playground: Critique & Fix
Indigo Playground: Pen and Wash
A First Test of Indigo's AI Playground
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Indigo Playground: Pen & Ink
2 September 2026
We thought we'd about covered Adobe Indigo's new AI Playground but it came in surprisingly handy the other day.
Pen & Ink. Portraits of two of the people we knew.
We'd been to a neighborhood gathering on the weekend in some friends' backyard. Before the light faded into night, the hostess ran up to the second story of the house, leaned out the back window and took a group photo with her phone.
This got spread around as a 640-pixel-wide image. VGA, we used to call it.
Since everyone but the hostess was in it, we thought it would make a nice memory device for remembering the names of all the people we met that evening. There were nearly two dozen and we only knew five of them.
We thought we might generate an outline of the people in the photo to write their names on each outline, like magazines used to do to identify people in group photos on the cover.
But that would have required some research. We remembered, instead, that Indigo has a Pen & Ink style in its AI Playground that could do the job without researching how. But only for Indigo images.
We thought we could fool it.
Or, more accurately, we thought we could accommodate it. By printing the VGA image on our color printer and using Indigo to photograph the print.
So that's what we did.
With the image in Indigo, we ran it through the Pen & Ink style in AI Playground and took a peek.
What you're seeing here are a couple of 100 percent crops of the Playground rendering. For comparison, below, there's the 100 percent crop of the Indigo capture of your editor with the conversion.
We were amazed, frankly.
The photo of the print has very little detail. But Indigo was able to form recognizable faces with eyes, eyebrows, mouths, noses, ears, hair and more. It was, we smiled, generous in ignoring wrinkles so that everyone lost about 40 years.*
It also created a lot of detail for the furniture and flora that just wasn't in the print, which seemed to merely suggest furniture and flora.
The only failure, we thought, was in drawing wine glasses, most of which were empty or nearly so and thus invisible to Playground. Which only made it look like we were all demonstrating a secret salute.
In the end, Playground gave us more than outlines of people in the group photo. It gave us a pen-and-ink sketch of the group. Which was a lot more than we had expected.
