Adobe Undertaking Indigo is a brand new photograph app from former Pixel digital camera engineers

Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Project Indigo, a brand new iPhone digital camera app from among the workforce behind the Pixel digital camera. The venture 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 digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Reasonably than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Undertaking Indigo is meant to make use of “solely delicate tone mapping, boosting of colour 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 really need will not 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 guide controls, “and the very best picture high quality that computational pictures 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 response to Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally contains a few of Adobe’s extra experimental photo features, 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 kind a workforce with the specific 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 usually credited with popularizing the idea of computational pictures, the place digital camera apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone photographs. Google’s success in that enviornment kicked off a digital camera 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 likewise an attention-grabbing check whether or not a third-party app that may produce higher photographs is sufficient to beat the default.

Undertaking Indigo is on the market to obtain totally free 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.

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