Adobe has released a camera app called Project Indigo that makes smartphone cameras more “SLR-like,” with “full manual controls, a more natural look and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide — in both JPEG and raw formats.” The Project Indigo app is available free, for now, on iOS from Adobe Labs, which quietly announced the product on its research website. The app aims to leverage a decade’s worth of advances in computational photography to help mobile photographers improve low-light and high dynamic range (HDR) image capture. Continue reading Adobe Project Indigo iOS App Improves Smartphone Photos

Pelican Imaging announced its prototype “array camera” for mobile devices that uses multiple lenses to record a single high-quality image. The company hopes this will appeal to manufacturers who want to make a slimmer smartphone, and to users interested in leveraging computational imaging (adding features such as the ability to alter focus after an image has been captured).

The three-year old company has received $17 million in venture funding. Its technical advisory board includes Marc Levoy, who co-designed the Google book scanner and helped launch Google Street View; Shree Nayar of Columbia’s Computer Vision Laboratory; and Bedabrata Pain, who co-invented active pixel sensor technology for mobile phone cameras.

“Pelican’s technology has the potential to upset the traditional tradeoff between the sensitivity and resolution of a camera and its thickness,” Levoy said, adding “Pelican’s solution is small, fast and inexpensive — which makes it a very exciting technology.” According to Nayar, the technology is a “paradigm shift in imaging and video” likely to “bring computational imaging applications to the mass market.”

Check out this Engadget post to see a video about observing a scene with multiple cameras through synthetic aperture photography.

Related CNET article: “Pelican shows slim phone-camera prototype” (2/9/11)

For more information, visit the Pelican press release.