There's a Japanese word, komorebi, that describes beams of light and dappled shadows that result when the sun shines through trees. When I take my dog on walks around my leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C., komorebi is what most often catches my eye, especially in this autumnal moment when dense, green summer foliage is starting to thin and turn golden. As the sun sets and the shadows grow long on the edge of a precipitous valley near my apartment, the foliage creates fluttering patterns of warm and cool colors. I try to photograph these apparitions with my iPhone camera, but I'm always disappointed in the results: the device's automated image processing treats contrast as a problem to be solved, aggressively darkening the highlights and lightening up the shadows to achieve a bland flatness. Little of the lambent atmosphere I see in real life survives in the image.

Apple has acquired a startup in the UK that develops technology designed to improve smartphone photography. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Spectral Edge for an undisclosed sum. Spectral Edge uses machine learning to "make smartphone pictures crisper, with more accurate colors." This works primarily by taking an infrared image and blending it with a standard photo. "Spectral Edge combines patented Image Fusion tech with Deep Learning to reveal more of the color, detail and clarity in any image," the company explained in its pitch.