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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

most people just want to see blurry shit in the background and think it makes it professional. if you really want to see it fall down, put things in the foreground and set the focal point somewhere in the middle. it'll still get the background blurry, but it gets the foreground all wrong. i'm guessing the market willing to pay for "better" faked shallow depth of field would be pretty small.

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> and think it makes it professional.

That's a bit cynical. Blurring the background can make the foreground object stand out more, objectively (?) improving the photo in some cases.

I get what he means. The gold standards for professional “bokeh” portraits, a 85mm f/1.4 prime, is typically a $1000-2000 lens.

Yeah that's why I didn't write the app already. I feel like the people who want "better faked depth" usually just end up buying a real camera.

Sample of one, but I’m interested. I used to use a real camera and now very rarely do. But I also often find the iPhone blurring very fake and I’ve never understood why. I assumed it was just impossible to do any better, given the resources they throw at the problem. If you could demonstrate the difference, maybe there would be a market, even if just for specific use cases like headshots or something.

Lytro had dedicated cameras and inferior resolution so they failed to gain enough traction to stay viable. You might have a better chance being that it's still on the same device, but the paid for app would be a push.

However, you could just make the app connect to localhost and hoover up the user's data to monetize and then offer the app for free. That would be much less annoying than showing an ad at launch or after every 5 images taken. Or some other scammy app dev method of making freemium apps successful. Ooh, offer loot boxes!!!

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