Marc Levoy, former photographic engineer for Google’s Pixel phones, has joined Adobe as Vice President and Fellow. The company describes in an email The Verge obtained that his assignment will be “centered on the concept of a universal camera app,” but did not elaborate on the scope of said app.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Levoy left Google in March — confirming earlier reporting from The Information — after having developed photographic features such as HDR+, Portrait Mode, and Night Sight that leveraged computational processing. Team morale in the Pixel division was reportedly ailing in the wake of the Pixel 4’s poor sales performance.
All of those items improved the output capabilities of a device. What it sounds like Levoy is about to do on Adobe’s behalf could range from exporting all of those abilities into a downloadable third-party app — perhaps it would be an extension of the existing Photoshop Camera app — or, on the deep end, breaking infrastructural ground to allow devices and apps of all sorts utilize on-device processing for such features.
Time will ultimately tell what the work is for.
