Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Challenge Indigo, a brand new iPhone digicam app from among the workforce behind the Pixel digicam. The challenge combines the computational images 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 fashion Challenge Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Fairly than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Challenge 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” strategy some third-party apps are taking. “Primarily based on our conversations with photographers, what they actually need isn’t 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 images can present,” whether or not you need a JPEG or a RAW file on the finish. Challenge Indigo achieves that by dramatically under-exposing the photographs it combines collectively, and counting on a bigger variety of photographs to mix — as much as 32 frames, in line with Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally contains a few of Adobe’s extra experimental picture options, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to eradicate reflections from pictures.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a number of months later to kind a workforce with the specific aim of constructing a “common digicam app”. Primarily based on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same yr. At Google, Kainz and Levoy have been usually credited with popularizing the idea of computational images, 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 all places, but additionally led to some fairly over-the-top pictures. Challenge Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and in addition an attention-grabbing check whether or not a third-party app that may produce higher pictures is sufficient to beat the default.
Challenge 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 sooner or later sooner or later.
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