socialrosiechen: Adobe's Plenoptic technology can refocus your photos after you shoot them

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Adobe's Plenoptic technology can refocus your photos after you shoot them

Filed under: Photo, Adobe

If you've ever taken a blurry photo and wished you had focused it differently, Adobe's new Plenoptic technology could be just what you need. It combines a custom lens for your camera and a software component for your Mac or PC, and allows you to focus on anything you want, after you've shot the photo. I'm not clear on all the technical details, but the basic idea is that Plenoptic captures hundreds of miniature versions of your image, which it then uses to construct the larger image.

So, you're not really changing the focus of your image with Plentoptic, you're actually rebuilding an entirely new image where the focus is on a different plane. That way, you can choose to accentuate the foreground or the background of the image without losing any detail.

This is some serious future-flying-car-magic tech we're talking about. It's not commercially available yet, but it's awesome to see what we'll be able to do with digital photographs in the future.

See a demo in the video below, via LaptopMag.