Adobe says it has hired Marc Levoy, a top researcher who developed computational photography for Google's Pixel line, to help it make a universal camera app
Adobe is moving fast on camera software: just over a month after launching Photoshop Camera with Sensei-suggested filters on iOS and recent Pixel, Galaxy, and OnePlus phones, it has hired Marc Levoy, the researcher who built computational photography for Google's Pixel line. The hire fills a hole on Google's side of the ledger too — [[a:953656|Pixel's camera lead and general manager had already left over the past year as sales disappointed]].
Google's camera organization loses its most prominent computational photography researcher at the same moment Adobe gains exactly that expertise for its universal camera app effort.
Second-order effects
A cross-platform Adobe camera app competes directly with the per-device computational pipelines that differentiate phones like the Pixel, pushing camera quality from a hardware moat toward software any handset can run.
Third-order effects
If capture excellence becomes downloadable rather than baked into a vendor's silicon stack — as Project Indigo on iPhones suggests — phone makers are pushed to compete on styling and identity of images instead, the territory Google's Camera Looks occupies.
The trend: Computational photography is migrating from a phone maker's in-house differentiator to portable third-party apps, shifting competition from sensors to image styling.
Interestinggg I'm guessing this would this be a free app meant to funnel people into CC subscriptions (like their other mobile apps) but much harder to get traction with a camera app than an editing one https://www.theverge.com/...
This makes so much sense. An amazing Android camera app that works on any phone will be like RSTLN E for Android users. Already, the Adobe Photoshop camera app is halfway there https://www.theverge.com/...
Here's hoping this is what it sounds like. There's no good reason the improvements in Google's excellent camera app should be restricted to Pixel phones. (We've seen hacked versions of it working on other phones beautifully.) https://www.theverge.com/...
Adobe has mountains of research that doesn't make it into product, so I was excited to learn that Marc Levoy is joining Adobe. I like the idea that they might double down on computational photography-as-a-platform. https://www.theverge.com/...
Wow, what a coup for the 'Dobe! Congrats to Marc & Adobe. It was great collaborating with him on Photoshop & computational photography when he was at Stanford ~15 years ago (!), and I can't wait to see what he does inside the walls. https://www.theverge.com/...
This seems like a huge win for iOS users. Google chose to never share their special Camera app with other Android phones, let alone iPhone. iOS has a consistent, well-abstracted set of Camera API, as FOCOS, Halide, etc have shown. So... Adobe Camera on iPhone could be awesome. ht…
If Adobe ends up making a functional equivalent of GCam for all Android phones, well... Remind me to check on Pixel sales after that happens. https://twitter.com/...