Adobe Undertaking Indigo is a brand new picture ap...

Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Project Indigo, a brand new iPhone digital camera app from a few of the crew behind the Pixel digital camera. The mission 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 fashion Undertaking Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Fairly than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Undertaking Indigo is meant to make use of “solely gentle tone mapping, boosting of colour saturation, and sharpening.” That is deliberately not the identical because the “zero-processing” method some third-party apps are taking. “Primarily based on our conversations with photographers, what they really 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 handbook controls, “and the best picture high quality that computational images 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 accordance with 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 get rid of reflections from images.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe just a few months later to kind a crew with the specific aim of constructing a “common digital camera app”. Primarily based on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same yr. At Google, Kainz and Levoy had been usually credited with popularizing the idea of computational images, 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 all over the place, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top images. Undertaking Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and likewise an fascinating check whether or not a third-party app which may produce higher images is sufficient to beat the default.

Undertaking Indigo is offered 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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