Digital photography with the iPhone just got better in Costa Rica thanks to a new app developed by Microsoft. The new app is called Pix, and it combines photography with artificial intelligence.

To develop Pix, Microsoft enlisted the expertise of a professional sports photographer. The following comes from the official Microsoft press release:

As a professional photographer shooting the Seattle Seahawks, Josh Weisberg dashed around the football field, constantly taking pictures in anticipation of the perfect shot.

“If you see it happen and you aren’t already taking pictures, it’s too late, you missed the shot,” says Weisberg, who is a principal program manager in the Computational Photography Group within Microsoft’s research organization. “You might take 10 pictures of nothing but get this one amazing photo of Russell Wilson throwing the ball.”

We all want that amazing photo – of our kids, our friends, ourselves, and we want to take it with our smartphone. To get it, most of us click the shutter and hope for the best. All too often, the result is disappointment: eyes shut, faces blurred, heads turned, no smiles.

Weisberg and his team released an iPhone app Wednesday that changes the playing field. It puts the skill of a professional photographer in your pocket.

Microsoft Pix captures a burst of 10 frames with each shutter click – some from before the tap – and uses artificial intelligence to select up to three of the best, unique shots. Before the remaining frames are deleted, the app uses data from the entire burst to remove noise, and then intelligently brightens faces, beautifies skin and adjusts the picture’s color and tone. These best, enhanced images are ready in about a second.

While the app is selecting and enhancing the best of the burst, another set of algorithms sorts through the frames to determine whether any motion would make for an interesting looping video within the image, such as a person’s hair tussled by the wind or the cascade of a waterfall in the background. If so, the app will loop the specific motion for a Harry Potter-esque effect called Live Image.

The interface for Microsoft Pix is intentionally simple – no modes or settings to select. The app’s smarts operate behind the scenes, helping users take better photos with a minimalist set of tools.

The app starts capturing frames the moment the viewfinder is loaded and intelligently tweaks settings for exposure and focus. If faces are detected, the entire process is optimized around them.

The open-eye detector builds on a legacy of facial recognition technology that most smartphone users know from the boxes that cameras put around faces in the viewfinder, explains Neel Joshi from Microsoft Research’s graphics group. For Microsoft Pix, he and colleagues narrowed the focus of facial-recognition algorithms to look at specific properties of the face, such as whether the eyes are open or closed.

Microsoft Pix also ships with Microsoft Hyperlapse for mobile, a technology that Joshi developed in 2015 to smooth as well as speed up video into visually appealing time-lapses. Now available on iOS, Microsoft Hyperlapse is already available for Android and Windows Phone users. It employs image stabilization algorithms and intelligently selects which frames to keep for optimal flow in time lapses.

Microsoft Pix is currently available from the iTunes App Store. Android users in Costa Rica have to be patient; Microsoft is still developing this version.