Marc Levoy, the researcher who used the software to turn Google’s Pixel camera into a powerhouse, teamed up with Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today.
Levoy led the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google’s Pixel smartphones, which includes features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode and HDR +. His work also helped Pixels take great photos without requiring as much hardware as competing phones: The Pixel line only needed a single camera to stay competitive with Apple iPhones, until the desire to get sharper zoomed images. pushed Google to add a second telephoto lens with Pixel 4. from last year (the first iPhone with a second lens, iPhone X, came out in 2017).
At Adobe, it looks like Levoy could be planning to make a great camera not just for Pixel users, but for anyone with a smartphone. Levoy will work on computational photography initiatives across Adobe, and intriguingly, his efforts will be “focused on the concept of a universal camera app,” the company said in an email. With that said, Adobe couldn’t immediately define “universal camera app” for us; We’ve also heard that that phrase refers to an app platform that companies like Facebook and Snapchat could use to produce their own camera apps, or an app that could work, for example, with a camera phone and a larger camera like a DSLR. We hope to reduce that.
Adobe already offers a camera app in Photoshop Camera, and there’s a built-in Adobe Lightroom app as well, but perhaps Adobe has a broader view for its camera apps. And Adobe said in an email that Levoy will also work with the Photoshop Camera, Adobe Research and Sensei AI teams, so perhaps Photoshop Camera will be the focus of these larger efforts. Levoy will report to Adobe CTO, Abhay Parasnis, and it starts today.
Levoy left Google in March after nearly six years with the company. Before joining Google full-time, Levoy worked on camera at the $ 1,500 Google Glass Explorer Edition as a visiting professor at Google’s former Moonshot division, Google X, and launched a Google-funded research project at Stanford in 2002 that it finally became Street View in Google Maps. Levoy is also a computer graphics researcher at Stanford, and he helped get the world interested in light field photography with some of his writing there.
