Microsoft has done the unthinkable. It’s come out with the simplest camera app ever, it seems.
If you’re a casual photographer, taking good photos can be tricky, especially if like most of us, you rely on a smartphone & on its default camera app. You’re in luck, however, if you own an iPhone, as Microsoft has just introduced Pix, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based app that puts the skill of a pro photographer in your pocket.
Microsoft’s Research’s graphics group has been developing this tech for years & has finally produced a minimalist product for the masses that builds in a lot of tech behind the scenes to help you take great pictures. Let’s face it, people, & most significantly, their faces, is what most interests us when we take pictures. So, Microsoft has incorporated facial-recognition algorithms that make the app focus primarily on optimizing the face & recognize such things as whether your subject’s eyes are open or closed. The app captures a burst of frames from the get go (before you even tap on the shutter) & takes care of adjusting exposure & focus automatically, even in difficult lighting situations, & then recognizes faces & picks the best frame, optimizing around the faces’ best features.
You can compare the raw, unprocessed photo to the after-shot enhanced version & make sure that the latter actually looks better. Additionally, the app automatically creates a short looping video, called a ‘Live’ Image, if it senses interesting motion in your shot & helps you to stabilize & time lapse videos. It produces a smooth & stable looping video & evens the exposure by automatically stitching together enhanced burst frames. This eliminates camera instability that could be caused by hands moving during capture & different exposure adjustments caused by lighting variations. So this way you can see things like hair blowing or water flowing in the background without the jerkiness.
Other interesting features of the app are: smart settings that automatically check scene & lighting between each shutter tap, updating settings between each shot; automatic deletion of the best images from each burst for storage, deleting the rest so you don’t waste your phone’s memory; auto-sync to your camera roll so you don’t need to import or save videos manually & use of iOS sharing to share pics using your installed apps, like Instagram or Facebook.
Click here to download Pix on your iOS device.
- This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. -
Image Credit: Microsoft
