Adobe Venture 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 crew behind the Pixel digital camera. The venture combines the computational photography 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 Venture Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Somewhat than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Venture 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. “Primarily based on our conversations with photographers, what they really need is just not 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 best picture high quality that computational pictures can present,” whether or not you need a JPEG or a RAW file on the finish. Venture 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, based on 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 remove reflections from images.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a number of months later to kind a crew with the specific objective of constructing a “common digital camera app”. Primarily based 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 pictures, the place digital camera apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to provide high quality smartphone images. Google’s success in that area kicked off a digital camera arms race that is raised the bar in every single place, but additionally led to some fairly over-the-top images. Venture Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and in addition an fascinating take a look at whether or not a third-party app that may produce higher images is sufficient to beat the default.

Venture Indigo is offered 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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