Adobe Venture Indigo is a brand new picture app from former Pixel digicam 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 staff 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 Venture Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Relatively than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Venture Indigo is meant to make use of “solely delicate tone mapping, boosting of coloration saturation, and sharpening.” That is deliberately not the identical because the “zero-processing” method 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 may produce,” Levoy and Kainz write.

The brand new app additionally has absolutely handbook 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. 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, 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 eradicate reflections from pictures.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to type a staff with the categorical objective of constructing a “common digicam app”. Based mostly on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same 12 months. At Google, Kainz and Levoy have been typically credited with popularizing the idea of computational pictures, the place digicam apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to provide high quality smartphone pictures. Google’s success in that area kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar in every single place, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top pictures. Venture Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and likewise an attention-grabbing take a look at whether or not a third-party app that may produce higher pictures is sufficient to beat the default.

Venture Indigo is on the market 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 in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later.

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