Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Undertaking Indigo, a brand new iPhone digital camera app from a number of the crew behind the Pixel digital camera. The venture combines the computational images methods that engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz popularized at Google, with professional controls and new AI-powered options.
Of their announcement of the brand new app, Levoy and Kainz model Undertaking Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Relatively than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Undertaking Indigo is meant to make use of "solely gentle tone mapping, boosting of coloration saturation, and sharpening." That's deliberately not the identical because the "zero-processing" strategy some third-party apps are taking. "Based mostly on our conversations with photographers, what they actually need shouldn’t be zero-process however a extra pure look — extra like what an SLR would possibly produce," Levoy and Kainz write.
The brand new app additionally has absolutely handbook controls, "and the best picture high quality that computational images can present," whether or not you need a JPEG or a RAW file on the finish. Undertaking Indigo achieves that by dramatically under-exposing the pictures it combines collectively, and counting on a bigger variety of pictures to mix — as much as 32 frames, in line with Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally consists of a few of Adobe's extra experimental photograph options, like "Take away Reflections," which makes use of AI to eradicate reflections from photographs.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to kind a crew with the categorical purpose of constructing a "common digital camera app". Based mostly on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same 12 months. At Google, Kainz and Levoy had been typically credited with popularizing the idea of computational images, the place digital camera apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to provide high quality smartphone photographs. Google's success in that area kicked off a digital camera arms race that's raised the bar in every single place, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top photographs. Undertaking Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and likewise an fascinating take a look at whether or not a third-party app that may produce higher photographs is sufficient to beat the default.
Undertaking Indigo is accessible to obtain without spending a dime now, and runs on both the iPhone 12 Professional and up, or the iPhone 14 and up. An Android model of the app is coming in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later.
This text initially appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/adobe-project-indigo-is-a-new-photo-app-from-former-pixel-camera-engineers-213453207.html?src=rss