Adobe Project Indigo is a new photo app from former Pixel camera engineers

Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Project Indigo, a brand new iPhone digicam app from a number of the crew behind the Pixel digicam. The challenge combines the computational photography 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 model Undertaking Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Somewhat than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Undertaking Indigo is meant to make use of “solely delicate 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 is just not zero-process however a extra pure look — extra like what an SLR may produce,” Levoy and Kainz write.

The brand new app additionally has totally handbook controls, “and the best picture high quality that computational images can present,” whether or not you desire 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 photo features, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to get rid of reflections from pictures.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a number of months later to kind a crew with the categorical objective 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 images, the place digicam apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone pictures. Google’s success in that enviornment kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar in all places, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top pictures. Undertaking Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and likewise an attention-grabbing take a look at whether or not a third-party app which may produce higher pictures is sufficient to beat the default.

Undertaking Indigo is obtainable to obtain at no 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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