Adobe Challenge 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 number of the staff 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 Challenge Indigo as the higher reply to typical smartphone digicam complaints of restricted controls and over-processing. Moderately 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 actually 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 absolutely guide 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. 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 accordance 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 get rid of reflections from photographs.

Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a number of months later to type a staff with the specific purpose of constructing a “common digicam app”. Based mostly 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 enviornment kicked off a digicam arms race that is raised the bar all over the place, but additionally 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 offered 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 sooner or later sooner or later.

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