Adobe launched its own views on how smartphone cameras work this week with Project Indigo, a new iPhone camera app for some of the team behind the Pixel cameras. In this project, Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz combine popular computer photography technology on Google with Pro Controls and new AI-powered features.
To them announcement Of the new apps, Levoy and Kainz Style Project Indigo are the better answers to the typical smartphone camera complaints of limited control and overprocessing. Rather than using aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Project Indigo is supposed to use “only mild tone mapping, increased color saturation, sharpening.” This is not intentionally the same as the “zero processing” approach that some third-party apps are getting. “Based on the conversations they have with the photographers, what they really want is a more natural look, not a process zero.
Also, the new app has completely manual controls. “And the highest quality calculated photos can provide”, whether you need jpeg or raw files. According to Levoy and Kainz, Project Indigo is achieving what it depends on dramatically exposing the shots it combines and combining more shots. The app also includes some of Adobe’s more experimental photography features, such as “Remove Reflections,” which uses AI to eliminate reflection from photos.
Levoy left Google in 2020 and joined Adobe a few months later to form a team with a clear goal of building a “universal camera app.” Based on His LinkedInKainz joined Adobe in the same year. On Google, Kainz and Levoy often spread the concept of computational photography, where camera apps rely more on software than hardware to create high-quality smartphone photos. Google’s success in that arena started camera arm races that raised bars everywhere, but also led to quite a bit of over-picture. Project Indigo has been modified a bit, and it’s also an interesting test if third-party apps that may create better photos are enough to beat the defaults.
Project Indigo is free to download now and runs on either the iPhone 12 Pro and Up or the iPhone 14 or later. The Android version of the app is coming at some point in the future.
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