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.
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 X, came out in 2017.)