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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

It's now possible to change the depth of field after taking the photo. I wasn't paying close enough attention to know if this will also be possible on older iPhones.

EDIT: sounds like it's just the new iPhones. But it includes the less expensive Xr.

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I've been doing this since day 1 of having my iPhone X with the app Focos [0]. I spent $10 even though I didn't need to because it was so amazing.

[0] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/focos/id1274938524?mt=8

Thanks, I had no idea this existed.

> I wasn't paying close enough attention to know if this will also be possible on older iPhones.

I don't think it was mentioned in the keynote, and I hope it isn't just a software flag like what they did with Live Photos on the iPhone 6S:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/15/9546639/3d-touch-live-ph...

They bought the company ~3 years ago that made a camera with post-processing DoF tech: LinX.

Are you referring to Lightro?

I think you mean Lytro, which definitely came to mind during the keynote. Specifically, when they said that it had never been possible to change DOF in photos before. I was listening carefully to see if they would qualify that with "smartphone photography" — but they didn't. I think Lytro's tech beat them to the punch by around a decade.

This stuck out to me, the inventor and CEO of Lytro was my computer graphics professor at Berkeley.

One of our projects in class about adjusting DoF post-capture, and it was definitely one of our exam questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera

Light field cameras use different tech as I understand it.

No doubt they use different tech, but it struck me as untrue to say that never before has it been possible to change DOF after taking a photo. Isn't that precisely what Lytro enabled?

I think the LinX acquisition was more related to FaceID.

Was the bokeh functionality using software to create an artificial depth of field effect, or does the camera capture a range of depth of field? My immediate guess was that it's actually clever software, but was it confirmed either way?

I believe the bokeh is all software similar to the HTC One M8. The only consumer camera I know of that captures multiple DOF is the now defunct Lyrto's, which Jobs reportedly had an interest in for the iPhone.

My impression is that the dual-camera models will capture real frames for depth of field and iPhone XR will achieve it in software. I could be wrong about that though.

When Portrait Mode was first released, they said that the camera array splits the field up into 9 (IIRC) depths based on distance. So probably what's happening here is they save the depth metadata so that you can adjust how blurred you want the background to be.

There's more to bokeh than 'how blurred is the background', it involves things like "how many leafs inside the lens are you using to control aperture".

You can "simplistically" (although still nicely) simulate this, of course.

There may be "key frames", but given that changing aperture is a mechanical action, I can't see how they could capture the range short of shooting a (very short) video as the aperture range is swept.

The calculations are software - and they (obliquely) reference this by "made possible by the new processor".

It's similar to Portrait mode, where they were spinning it as "not done by post-processing", when in reality, a la Tesla and Autopilot, whilst not fitting most people's idea of post work (aka Lightroom/Photoshop), the camera generates a preview of the effect then immediately applies it post shutter release.

The Vivo Nex can do this too btw. It's a cool feature though.

What's a Vivo Nex?

That's a smartphone.

Not really. It just finds what’s closest and then blurs everything else with a depth-independent uniform blur.

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