Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Challenge Indigo, a brand new iPhone digicam app from a number of the group behind the Pixel digicam. The challenge combines the computational pictures 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 model Challenge Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam 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” strategy some third-party apps are taking. “Primarily based on our conversations with photographers, what they actually need will not 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 totally guide controls, “and the very best picture high quality that computational pictures 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 consists of a few of Adobe’s extra experimental picture options, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to remove reflections from photographs.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to type a group with the specific objective of constructing a “common digicam app”. Primarily based on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that very same 12 months. At Google, Kainz and Levoy had been typically credited with popularizing the idea of computational pictures, the place digicam apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone photographs. Google’s success in that area kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar all over the place, but in addition led to some fairly over-the-top photographs. Challenge Indigo is a little bit of a corrective, and in addition an fascinating check whether or not a third-party app which may produce higher photographs is sufficient to beat the default.
Challenge Indigo is on the market to obtain without spending a dime 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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