Microsoft releases Pix, goes toe to toe with built-in iOS camera app

Microsoft is attempting to hone in on the iPhone camera’s turf.

The tech giant’s research arm has launched Pix, which enhances the photos that users take in a variety of ways, on Wednesday morning. The app is designed to make photos look better and even improves on Apple’s Live Photos ability to capture scenes that have moving elements in them.

The free app is now available on the iOS App Store and is particularly well-suited to take pictures of people, and is built to make adjustments to a photo on the fly as the scene changes. That way, the exposure of an image should always be tuned to the right conditions. It recognizes faces and uses Microsoft’s Hyperlapse technology to stabilize video shot with the app as well.

The app works to take a burst of photos once the shutter button is pressed, then proceeds to pick the best ones for final use. That burst is also used to power Pix’s Live Image feature, which creates a short moving picture when there’s motion in a burst.

This animation tops Apple’s Live Photos feature, which captures video before and after every photo is taken. Microsoft touts its feature as a way to get the best parts of Apple’s moving picture functionality without requiring as much storage space and stabilizing the result.

So, give it a try, let us know what you think of it in the comments and we can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Via Macworld and the iOS App Store