Adobe's camera to focus for you - after the event

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 24 Sep 2010 at 13:47

Adobe has shown off a camera that can focus images after a picture has been taken – promising a sharper future for digital photographers.

At the Nvidia GTC 2010 event, the company demonstrated a multi-array lens and software that effectively captures everything in the field of view and then allows the user to decide what to focus on after the shot has been taken.

According to the demonstration, the "plenoptic" technology works by breaking the image up into tiny fragments. The microlens array that splits the light arriving in the camera gives it an infinite depth of field, with the subtle changes of angle being used as raw data to calculate the relative distance of each object within the picture.

Software running on GPUs then constructs the image based on an interpretation of the raw data.

In the demonstration, a captured image looked like a pixelated mess, but by tweaking the settings the developers were able to focus on a girl in the foreground, then on trees in the mid-ground, before homing in on beehives in the distance.

Impressive stuff, but it may remain a distant dream for clarity-disadvantaged photographers as it will be some time before manufacturers can squeeze the lens and processing power into DSLRs.