Sounds like the little photo gadget from Blade Runner is closer than we think...

Well then.

The eyes have it!

Check out the video here: [audioblog.fr]

The camera is for porn. Thank you, Adobe!

Here's how to do do a 'focus' brush in Photoshop.
[photography-on-the.net]

It's pretty slick!

that was really awesome

Didn't Stanford do this in 2005? Looks like they've added a 3d-history brush, but plenoptic light field digital photography isn't new: [graphics.stanford.edu]

The presentation was kinda meh...
But I liked that very much. And with what? 5+ megapixels we have in standard digicams nowadays, it's easy to get quality photos using that lens.

After they reduce that lens frame to something smaller, this will be another "weapon" against bad photography or digicam problems... along with the hardware and software stability options available now.

@fmccb: haha great, imagine you can choose with one to focus in those great orgy scenes!

Oh my. I'm in a minor heaven right now. :-)

I'm not so much concerned with a "focus brush", but it'd be damn nice to slightly change the perspective in a photo! Oh! yes!

OK, this is wonderful and all that.

However, it irritates me when the hype takes over. The presenter says "This is something you cannot do with a physical camera. There's no way to take a picture with just this section in focus and everything else out of focus. It's not physically possible to make a camera that does that."

Bullshit. View cameras make it possible to define a plane of focus that is not parallel to the film plane. Various limited soft focus techniques exist with filters on camera, retouching of negatives afterwards, or darkroom manipulation that make this sort of thing routine. Want another approach? Google for Lensbabies; they do *exactly* what he's describing. (In fact, the selective focus demo he gives struck me as nothing more than Lensbabies implemented in software.)

What he appeared to mean was that it's very difficult to achieve this sort of thing unless you've previsualized what you want to do. That's a very different thing. Let's be clear about this. This is not an improvement over classic photo technique. This is a way to grab a shot and fix it in the mix, afterwards, even if you had no idea what you were doing when you grabbed the shot.

That's not an illegitimate achievement. In fact, I can envision lots of things I'd love to do with tools like this. Tools like this could save money and enhance your reputation when, as per the example in the vid, your picture buyer can't make up their mind ahead of time about what sort of effect they want to see. However, it's a ridiculous overstatement to say such effects were previously impossible.

I'm very impressed. I wonder when we will get to see this, or something like this, on Canon and Nikon cameras.