The Brain Behind the Google Pixel Camera Is Building a Universal Camera App For Adobe (theverge.com) 26
Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google's Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today. The Verge reports: Levoy headed up the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google's Pixel smartphones, including 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 famously only needed a single camera to stay competitive with Apple's iPhones, until a desire for sharper zoom images pushed Google to add a second, telephoto lens with last year's Pixel 4. (The first iPhone with a second lens, the iPhone 7 Plus, came out in 2016.)
At Adobe, it sounds like Levoy could be planning to make a great camera not just for Pixel users, but for anyone with a smartphone. Levoy will be working on computational photography initiatives across Adobe, and intriguingly, his efforts will be "centered on the concept of a universal camera app," the company said in an email. [...] And Adobe said in an email that Levoy will also be working with the Photoshop Camera, Adobe Research, and Sensei AI teams, so maybe Photoshop Camera will be the focus for these bigger efforts. Levoy will report to Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, and he starts today. [...] That said, Adobe wasn't immediately able to define "universal camera app" for us -- we've also heard that phrase refer to an app platform that companies like Facebook and Snapchat could use to produce their own camera apps or an app that could work across, say, a cameraphone and a larger camera like a DSLR. We're hoping to narrow that down.
At Adobe, it sounds like Levoy could be planning to make a great camera not just for Pixel users, but for anyone with a smartphone. Levoy will be working on computational photography initiatives across Adobe, and intriguingly, his efforts will be "centered on the concept of a universal camera app," the company said in an email. [...] And Adobe said in an email that Levoy will also be working with the Photoshop Camera, Adobe Research, and Sensei AI teams, so maybe Photoshop Camera will be the focus for these bigger efforts. Levoy will report to Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, and he starts today. [...] That said, Adobe wasn't immediately able to define "universal camera app" for us -- we've also heard that phrase refer to an app platform that companies like Facebook and Snapchat could use to produce their own camera apps or an app that could work across, say, a cameraphone and a larger camera like a DSLR. We're hoping to narrow that down.
Oh no Adobe (Score:5, Funny)
I can see the business model now: you don't own your camera or your pictures, but you can subscribe to the Adobe service and have access from anywhere!
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No they arent saved as image files. If you want an image file, please select the image and then select export. No you cant do more than one at a time, because touch interface.
I am describing adobes _current_ camera app of course.
Re:Oh no Adobe (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see the business model now: you don't own your camera or your pictures, but you can subscribe to the Adobe service and have access from anywhere!
You see, you didn't actually take the picture. The picture itself was the product of our software, so you don't have any rights to it. Yeah, having the Adobe name attached to this is all I need to know that I should avoid it. Watch it store photos in a proprietary format that require some clunky piece of software to read them. Or they all get stored on their website you have to subscribe to.
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Nah, we just need Adobe to die. Which won't happen overnight but it's headed that way. But not just Adobe.
Ashitty (Score:2)
I read the summary about the tech and already felt impressed, but then the name "Above". Argh!
I'm sick of this shit. No forced "cloud" storage, no weird file formats, no weird bloated, restricted, crash-a-minute shitware, no "oh you can only select one at a time" or such crap, no suing anyone who tries to make a product that the user wants instead of being forced to use said shitware blah blah blah-
WE JUST WANT A PRODUCT THAT IS FUCKING STRAIGHTFORWARD AND EASY TO USE! Do they understand that? Or are they j
Re: Ashitty (Score:2)
"but then the name "Above""
bleh - Adobe (or Apoopie) :O)
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I swear, company heads catch the 'tard whenever they rake in huge amounts of money. Must be the accumulation of all of the illicit drug residue found on dollar bills fucking up their heads.
It's a truism that any successful enterprise starts out with a kernel of genius. Then the marketing fucks notice and hustle there way onto the scene. It's always been like that, Critical masses of that sort of thing become entities like Apple and Adobe.
Re: Ashitty (Score:2)
>Then the marketing fucks notice and
>hustle there way onto the scene.
These are called "parasites".
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WE JUST WANT A PRODUCT THAT IS FUCKING STRAIGHTFORWARD AND EASY TO USE! Do they understand that? Or are they just too fucking profoundly retarded to realise that a pissed customer is an ex-customer, and they will lose more potential buyers through bad word of mouth?
The problem is that "easy to use" is different for different people;
Easy to use for me and, I assume, you, is to just get a RAW+JPEG image we can process to our hearts content in our own software.
Easy to use for the majority of people is they click the button and the photo looks good and click another button to share it.
Unfortunately most people don't care about cloud storage, or exporting multiple images, or vendor lock-in. And people who invest in a platform are hard to sway even with bad experiences, jus
Re: Ashitty (Score:2)
M$ or Apple (Linux is still out of the grasp
of most non-techy consumers)
They just went with the lesser of the two evils.
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The problem is it has gotten to the point where no software out there can can compete with Adobe products. I am waiting for them to buy Autodesk then it'll be full-on anal penetration.
Re: Oh no Adobe (Score:2)
Please, don't give them any ideas.
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One can only assume it's about the money (and a pitch about the great work you'll be doing, and the great product we're making - this time it'll be different).
I hope said smart people are taking all the money they can, doing a lack-lustre job of whatever hair-brained idea Adobe has and then moving on, ready to take it easy living off their ill-gotten gains.
Either way, we can expect a phone app which updates itself to make no discernible changes every 20 minutes or so, requires an online account to use it, a
Re: Oh no Adobe (Score:2)
Food still has to be put on the table, and rent/mortgage needs to be paid.
Sometimes it means selling your soul. :\
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Because Adobe sells the best user-oriented image processing and DTP software. Best as in the most features, and the best UI. Gimp may do 80% of what Photoshop does, but the other 20% is important, and more importantly, the UI is hot garbage. Stuff you can do in seconds in Photoshop takes minutes in Gimp.
The name doesn't help either. Letting nerds name shit is terrible.
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Re: Oh no Adobe (Score:2)
Too bad the company is shit. :\
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Oh yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.
I presume that one day there will be free/Free software which surpasses Adobe. But that day is not this day.
How does a brain do this? (Score:2)
Reminds me of the Steve Martin movie The Brain
Screw Adobe (Score:2)
The kings of lock-in. Fuck them and everything they do.
Hey, I'm bored! (Score:1)
Smartphone processing on DSLR sensor? (Score:3)
I would love to see lightroom plugins that provide all the optimizations cellphones have. If this leads to better Lightroom plugins for my digital camera, I would welcome it and even gladly pay money for it. So much of taking a good picture is actually computation...figuring out how to process the vast amount of data picked up by the sensor...exposure compensation, white balance, noise filtering algorithms, etc. It seems like the smartphone makers are ahead of the Japanese camera companies in that regard (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji)
Outside of lightroom, though....I use software from Google, Apple, and Adobe daily. Adobe's Lightroom is, by far, the slowest application I use (and I am a Java programmer who uses many Java Swing-based tools). Adobe is a running joke among the industry as hiring the worst engineers and producing the worst software. I trust Google and Apple much more to make an app than Adobe. I am skeptical they can do a better job....but would LOVE to be proven wrong. I am very interested to see what comes of this.
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Your phone has a garbage sensor, but the newest models take surprisingly good photos. In contrast, when you download a RAW file from a modern full frame DSLR with far superior optics and sensors, sometimes they just don't look as good, especially straight off the camera. If you know your way around lightroom, it's easy to correct the image and make it superior to the phone version, but phones really narrowed the gap with computational tricks.
This pretty much only applies to one situation: Non-moving camera with little to no moving subjects.
That said, I'm impressed at what Google's software is able to pull out of the 16MP Sony sensor in my old phone - the noise reduction alone through stacking bursts is a very welcome feature for static subjects, which are mainly what I use a phone camera for.
If I'm photographing people, though, I'll take a fast shutter and a big sensor (or piece of film) over any amount of computational photography.