Hacker News Reader

This sounds very exciting. To play the devil's advocate however, on most of the example photos on Lytro's site, you really only need two points of focus - roughly near and far. Clicking on those two shows you everything there is to see in a picture.

If someone comes up with software to allow refocusing on two distance points with existing photos, they could eat Lytro's lunch. Can Picasa do something like this?

View on HN

If you have a photo that's all in focus (i.e. f15 aperture or something) you can throw parts out later with using masks in a photo editing tool, though it's time consuming.

I'd suggest you could get a similar effect with a camera that had two or three lenses using different focal lengths. Fujifilm already released a camera with two lenses: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08092209fujifilm3D.asp so it's just a software modification for that.

Using a photo where all is in focus you only need a depth-map to process the blur. I think something like the Kinect is making this possible already.

According to Wikipedia this is called "focus stacking", combining depths of field to create a larger depth of field. The page lists a number of apps/plugins that blend photos to create this effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking

Reply on news.ycombinator.com