Adobe has just released a new app in which it hopes to be able to encompass all aspects of your iPhone photography experience, from the creation and capture to composition.

Adobe’s Photoshop Camera is a new app that provides a bunch of very cool and advanced filters that leverage the company’s Sensei Artificial Intelligence features to automatically offer up the best filters for any given situation, taking much of the guesswork out of creating great photos.

While Adobe describes it as putting “the magic of Photoshop inside your camera,” in reality it doesn’t have much directly to do with the venerable photo editing app beyond the name, although it does seem to share some of the same underlying technologies, it’s not otherwise tied into Photoshop in any particularly unique way.

That’s not ultimately the point of Photoshop Camera however, and Adobe clearly hopes the well-known branding will help to encourage more uptake of the app, which really does provide a wealth of over 80 cool custom filters and effects along with some advanced computational photography features that provide automatic adjustments to lighting, focus, and exposure levels in order to provide the best quality photos. It can also minimize distortion when taking group selfies by recognition where each subject is positioned in the frame.

‘Blow Up Your Social Feed’

Adobe has also gotten some celebrity talent on board, with Photoshop lenses and other effects created by artists and influencers like Billie Eilish. To that end, the app clearly seems to be targeted more at users who are looking for cool new styles of photos to post on Instagram and Snapchat, making it seem like it leans more toward the fun and whimsical side than as a tool for serious photographers, and this is where it probably diverges the most significantly from the Photoshop name.

There are some basic photo editing features in here, to be fair, but they’re really secondary to the main purpose of the app, which is to snap a picture, slap on a cool filter, and post away. There’s a magic wand button to automatically make adjustments, as well as a limited ability to tweak things like exposure, contrast, and colour saturation. Photoshop Camera also can’t (yet) record video — even short clips or Live Photos — so you won’t be able to use the fun effects for anything other than still photography.

While you can of course open your creations in Photoshop for further editing, they’re saved as simple JPEG files, not layered PSD files, even if you choose to share them directly into Adobe’s Lightroom app, so you don’t gain any special editing capabilities. Photoshop Camera does save a copy of the original unfiltered photo when saving your creations to your iPhone’s Camera Roll, however.

The Tip of the Iceberg

In speaking with the team at Adobe, The Verge notes that this is likely just the first wave of what could become a much more expansive ecosystem for Adobe, which notes that it doesn’t see itself in competition with social apps or other camera apps.

Instead, Adobe plans to expand by leveraging its power to try and get its filters into some of those other apps, as well as adding more filters over time in partnership with more well-known artists and creators. In fact, the current layout of the filters looks like it’s ripe for monetization by letting Adobe essentially offer a built-in “store” where customers to pay to unlock premium filters and lenses.

Adobe also adds that it may have “special purposes lenses directly monetized” around specific events and venues, but at the end of the day this seems to be more about trying to use Photoshop Camera as a sort of “halo effect” to draw more customers into its paid professional tools like Photoshop and Lightroom, which makes sense as those are Adobe’s bread and butter. Adobe CTO Adbhay Parasnis told The Verge that it’s a strategy that’s been working well for them, and Photoshop Camera is simply the next step in that journey.