Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Mission Indigo, a brand new iPhone digital camera app from among the workforce behind the Pixel digital camera. 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 Mission Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digital camera complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Somewhat than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Mission Indigo is meant to make use of “solely gentle tone mapping, boosting of coloration saturation, and sharpening.” That is deliberately not the identical because the “zero-processing” strategy some third-party apps are taking. “Based mostly on our conversations with photographers, what they really need just 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 absolutely handbook controls, “and the best picture high quality that computational pictures can present,” whether or not you need a JPEG or a RAW file on the finish. Mission 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 keeping with Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally consists of a few of Adobe’s extra experimental photograph options, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to eradicate reflections from photographs.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to type a workforce with the specific 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 usually credited with popularizing the idea of computational pictures, the place digital camera apps rely extra on software program than {hardware} to supply high quality smartphone photographs. 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 photographs. Mission 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 photographs is sufficient to beat the default.
Mission 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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