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.