Technology | DOI: 10.1145/2184319.2184325
Gary Anthes
smarter Photography
Improvements in camera hardware, image processing,
camera-photographer interfaces, and image viewing
are advancing the state of the art in digital photography.
For Most of its first 10 years, digital photography largely mimicked film photography. Of course, Photoshop and other software made image
processing easier, but digital photographers worked in much the same way
as before and were often beset by similar problems. Now, however, digital
photography is advancing to a fundamentally new level of capability, aided
by technology that would have been
unimaginable a decade ago.
For example, in the days of film
photography, a photographer finding an unwanted object in a picture
had few options. He or she might have
cropped it out, “burned” the unwanted
object in the darkroom to make it less
conspicuous, or tried to take a better
photo the next time. Soon after 2000,
however, a digital photographer possessed a new option with photo-edit-ing software’s clone tool, which could
copy over the unwanted object with a
more desirable part of the image.
Going one step further, computer
scientists at Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity have demonstrated prototype soft-
ware that searches millions of photos
on the Internet, locates one similar to
yours, and downloads an image patch
to paste into your photo. “The whole
idea seems a little ludicrous,” says
Alexei Efros, leader of the team that in-
vented the technique. “It doesn’t seem
like this should work.”
Advancements in computational
photography are dramatically in-
creasing both the ease of taking pic-
tures and the quality of those pic-
tures. The advances can be classified
as those occurring in camera hard-
ware, in post-processing software, in
prompts and automated assists to the
user taking a picture, and in powerful
tools for users retrieving and viewing
digital images.
Lytro Inc.’s recently introduced
light field camera uses a unique new
Lytro inc.’s Light field engine software travels with an image, thereby enabling users to
selectively focus on any part of an image by clicking on it.
sensor and software to, in essence,
capture everything in sharp focus. The
magic is that, unlike a conventional
sensor that records only the color and
intensity of light, the Lytro’s image sensor also records the direction, or angle,
at which a ray of light strikes it. This
additional data enables algorithms in
the camera’s software to reconstruct
a sharp view of any part of the photograph. User software, called the Light
Field Engine, travels with the image so
viewers can selectively focus by clicking on any part of the image.
“Being able to snap the shutter
without picking a thing of interest, or
focal point, and being able to refocus it
later has huge potential,” says Richard
Koci-Hernandez, assistant professor at
the University of California, Berkeley’s
Graduate School of Journalism and a
beta user of the Lytro camera. Koci-
Hernandez recalls his days as a film
photographer at the San Jose Mercury
News, when he often had to make split-
second decisions about where in the
viewfinder to focus. This is not neces-
sary with the Lytro camera, he notes.