Adobe's computational photography

Adobe has recently unveiled some novel photo editing abilities with anew technology known as computational photography. With a combinationof a special lens and computer software, the technique can divide up acamera image in different views and reassemble them with a computer.

The method uses a lens embedded with 19 smallerlenses and prisms, like an insect's compound eye, to capture a scenefrom different angles at the same time. As Dave Story, Vice Presidentof Digital Imaging Product Development at Adobe, explained, this lenscan determine the depth of every pixel in the scene.

This means that, after the photo is taken andtransferred to a computer, people can edit certain layers of the photowithin seconds. If a user wants to eliminate the background, the newsoftware can simply erase everything in the image that appears at orbeyond a certain distance.

Further, people can use a 3D focus brush to "reach into the sceneand adjust the focus," Story explained during a news conference, in avideo posted by Audioblog.fr. At the conference, he uses the focusbrush to bring a blurry statue in the foreground of an image into focussimply by dragging the tool over the area on the image. Alternatively,he switched to a de-focus brush to bring a second statue locatedfurther back in the image out of focus.

Source: physorg.comAdded: 26 November 2007