Adobe Mission Indigo is a brand new picture app from former Pixel digicam engineers

Adobe launched its personal tackle how smartphone cameras ought to work this week with Project Indigo, a brand new iPhone digicam app from a few of the crew behind the Pixel digicam. The mission combines the computational photography 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 digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Quite than utilizing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Mission Indigo is meant to make use of “solely delicate 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 will not be 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 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. 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, based on Levoy and Kainz. The app additionally contains a few of Adobe’s extra experimental photo features, like “Take away Reflections,” which makes use of AI to get rid of reflections from photographs.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a couple of months later to type a crew with the categorical objective of constructing a “common digicam app”. Based mostly 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 supply high quality smartphone photographs. Google’s success in that enviornment kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar in every single 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 attention-grabbing check whether or not a third-party app which may produce higher photographs is sufficient to beat the default.

Mission Indigo is accessible 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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