Former CEO of Google’s Pixel division works at Adobe on camera app

Marc Levoy, who previously headed the camera software team for Google’s Pixel division responsible for advanced camera features such as HDR + and Night Sight, has joined Adobe. Here he will work on the development of a universal camera app.

The news was, among other things announced David Imel of Android Authority and Levoy has confirmed his appointment at Adobe on his LinkedIn page. Engadget quotes from an email from Adobe confirming its employment. In it, Adobe says that Levoy will be responsible for developing the concept for a universal camera app.

Adobe does not provide further details on this, although the company does say that Levoy will work with the Photoshop Camera app, Adobe Research, the AI ​​tool Sensei and the Digital Imaging teams. Photoshop Camera is an existing camera app and camera functionality is also built into the Lightroom app, but Adobe probably has bigger plans in the field of camera apps.

Perhaps Adobe eventually wants to come up with a universal smartphone camera app where computational photography claims a leading role, where the hardware is less important and the quality of the Pixel cameras is achieved through the software. Levoy and his team were the first to make the switch to computational photography at Google, where the software is not so much a single frame as the starting point, but where the software composes the photo from multiple frames taken in quick succession.

Levoy, also a professor of computer science at Stanford University, announced in May this year that he has not been with Google since March. He worked there for more than five years. Partly thanks to his efforts, Google is very successful with the Pixel phones in terms of camera performance. Other smartphone manufacturers have copied functions such as HDR + and Night Sight to a greater or lesser extent.