Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Undertaking Indigo, a brand new iPhone digicam app from a number of the group behind the Pixel digicam. The venture combines the computational pictures strategies 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 fashion Undertaking Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Moderately than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Undertaking Indigo is meant to make use of “solely gentle tone mapping, boosting of shade saturation, and sharpening.” That is 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 isn’t 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 totally guide controls, “and the very best picture high quality that computational pictures 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 keeping with Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally contains a few of Adobe’s extra experimental photograph options, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to remove reflections from photographs.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to type a group with the categorical aim of constructing a “common digicam app”. Based mostly on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same yr. At Google, Kainz and Levoy had been typically credited with popularizing the idea of computational pictures, the place digicam apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone photographs. Google’s success in that area kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar all over the place, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top photographs. Undertaking Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and in addition an fascinating take a look at whether or not a third-party app which may produce higher photographs is sufficient to beat the default.
Undertaking Indigo is accessible to obtain without cost 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 sooner or later sooner or later.
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