Adobe Project Indigo is a new photo app from former Pixel camera engineers

Adobe launched his own vision of how smartphone cameras should work this week Project IndigoA new iPhone camera application from some teams behind the Pixel camera. The project combines the Computer photography Techniques that engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz have popularized at Google, with professional controls and new features fed by AI.

In their announcement From the new application, Levoy and Kainz Project Indigo style are the best response to typical complaints of limited command and overestring smartphone. Rather than using aggressive hindrance and sharpening, Project Indigo is supposed to use “only the mapping of light tones, the increase in color saturation and sharpening”. It is not intentionally the same as the “Zero transformation” Approach that some third-party applications take. “Based on our conversations with photographers, what they really want is not a zero process but a more natural look – more like what SLR could produce,” write Levoy and Kainz.

The new application also has fully manual controls “and the highest image quality that calculation photography can provide”, whether you want a JPEG or a raw file at the end. Project Indigo realizes that, by considerably underestimating the shots it combines, and relying on a larger number of shots to combine – up to 32 images, according to Levoy and Kainz. The application also includes some of the more adobes Characteristics of the experimental photoLike “delete reflections”, which uses AI to eliminate the reflections of the photos.

Levoy left Google in 2020And Joins Adobe A few months later to form a team with the express goal of building a “universal camera application”. Based on His LiendinKainz joined Adobe the same year. At Google, Kainz and Levoy have often been credited to popularize the concept of computer photography, where camera applications count more on software than hardware to produce photos of quality smartphones. Google’s success in this arena launched a camera arms race that raised the bar everywhere, but also led to fairly exaggerated photos. Project Indigo is a little corrective, and also an interesting test if a third -party application that could produce better photos is sufficient to beat the default.

Project Indigo is available for free download now, and operates on the iPhone 12 Pro and more, or iPhone 14 and more. An Android version of the application arrives at some point in the future.

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