Category Archives: Mobile

iPhone 16 + AI: Quick helpful summaries

Mobile, Photography

Check out my friend Bilawal’s summary thread, which pairs quick demos from Apple with bits of useful context:

There are some great additional details in this thread from Halide Camera as well:

Pixel 9 adds on-device image generation

AI/ML, Mobile

It’s wild that capabilities that blew our minds two years ago—for which I & others spent months on a waiting list for DALL•E, which demanded beefy servers to run—are now available (only better) running in your pocket, on your telephone. Check out the latest from Google:

Pixel Studio is a first-of-its-kind image generator. So now you can bring all ideas to life from scratch, right on your phone — a true creative canvas.9

It’s powered by combining an on-device diffusion model running on Tensor G4 and our Imagen 3 text-to-image model in the cloud. With a UI optimized for easy prompting, style changes and editing, you can quickly bring your ideas to conversations with friends and family.

Days of Miracles & Wonder, as always…

Demo: Camera Raw is coming to Photoshop for iPad

Mobile, Photography

Nine years ago, Google spent a tremendous amount of money buying Nik Software, in part to get a mobile raw converter—which, as they were repeatedly told, didn’t actually exist. (“Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…”)

If all that hadn’t happened, I likely never would have gone there, and had the acquisition not been so ill-advised & ill-fitting, I probably wouldn’t have come back to Adobe. Ah, life’s rich pageant… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, back in 2021, take ‘er away, Ryan Dumlao:

What a difference four years makes in iPhone cameras

Mobile, Photography

“People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years,” as the old saying goes. Similarly, it can be hard to notice one’s own kid’s progress until confronted with an example of that kid from a few years back.

My son Henry has recently taken a shine to photography & has been shooting with my iPhone 7 Plus. While passing through Albuquerque a few weeks back, we ended up shooting side by side—him with the 7, and me with an iPhone 12 Pro Max (four years newer). We share a camera roll, and as I scrolled through I was really struck seeing the output of the two devices placed side by side.

I don’t hold up any of these photos (all unedited besides cropping) as art, but it’s fun to compare them & to appreciate just how far mobile photography has advanced in a few short years. See gallery for more.