ENHANCE! (How Adobe Will Let You Take Perfectly Focused Images Every Time)

[_Belial]

Taken from Gizmodo

This is sooo clever!

Plenoptic is a stunning new lenses technology. When you use it, you don't need to care about having your subject in focus. You would be able to perfectly focus on any subject in your photography after you take the photo.

Invented by Adobe, Plenoptic consists on a very smart combination of special lens for your camera and software for your PC or Mac.

First, the lens' optics atomize the picture in thousands of tiny versions of the scene, all different from each other, at different angles and positions. When you add these lenses to your DSLR camera, the sensor would capture a huge grid of images made of all these little images. The effect is similar to the eyes of a fly.

Then, the software can take this grid and combine the versions into a single one. Using a simple slider, you can change the focus of the image in any way you want, picking any plane you desire to be in perfect, crystal-clear focus.

Watching the demo is almost magical. Basically, these guys have actually created the stuff you can see in stupid crime TV series and movies and make it real. I'm sure one day we will actually see stuff like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS7us...ayer_embedded#!

[TigerShark]

crikey, if i thought L type lenses were expensive, this will be crazy

[{{909}}]

very clever and seems to work well. cant see it going very far though, anyone with the amount of cash needed to buy lenses like this would probably have enough knowledge on how to use a normal camera properly

[flipper321]

Must mean a huge loss of image resolution as well....?

[Goldberg]

I work for a professional software company that makes software that is used in TV and Movies, we have a wide range of tools like this (The software costs $120,000 - a typical set up to use it with fast storage can result in $500,000). It is good to finally see them filtering to home users now, at least for still images.

Good stuff!

[casio]

that looks awe-inspiring, just think in 10yrs time when this sort of tech has been shrunk and refined to the point its built into normal point and shoot cameras, cctv cameras and mobile phones no one will ever take a blurry photo again unless that what they really want to.

Im sure banks would love this too, were always seeing banks getting robbed on crime stoppers, with this they could get clear images of the robbers through the manipulation of the one image.

also I bet F1 teams will love this, they can shoot images of the cars of teams they compete against and when they get a bit of the read diffuser thats out of focus due to the car doing a couple of hundred miles an hour they can re-jig it to get to see the parts they want.

it'd also get rid of the Mr blurrycam pre-release snaps of new gadgets if you snap an iphone as its being made and its blurry you can just fix it later

I know it'll likely reduce the image resolution to begin with but given time the megapixel resolutions will continue to increase as they do at the moment so in 10 yrs we could have 50-100mp cameras with this built in, I cant think of any thing I need it for but I definatly want it lol