Adobe Challenge 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 a number of the staff behind the Pixel digital camera. 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 fashion Challenge Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Quite than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Challenge Indigo is meant to make use of “solely delicate tone mapping, boosting of shade 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 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 very best picture high quality that computational images can present,” whether or not you desire a JPEG or a RAW file on the finish. Challenge 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 keeping 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 number of months later to type a staff with the categorical purpose of constructing a “common digital camera 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 images, the place digital camera apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone pictures. Google’s success in that enviornment 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 pictures. Challenge 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 pictures is sufficient to beat the default.

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

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