A Camera Uses Light Field Technology to Give Photos New Depth; Game-Changer or Gimmick?
Lytro's latest camera lets viewers shift focus and
perspective on photos after they were shot. Personal Technology
Columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler tests whether this is photography's next
chapter, or just a neat gimmick.
What might photos look like if your camera could capture more depth?
Rewind with me for a moment to that scene in pretty much every crime investigation show, where good guys studying security shots "enhance" the image to reveal the villain.
Everybody
knows that real blurry photos can't be made sharp after the fact. But
that's exactly the premise of the new Illum camera from a startup called
Lytro.
Instead of snapping a solitary
image, the Illum captures a whole moment—known as the light field—so you
can change focus and shift perspective after you've taken the shot.
Just by clicking around a screen, the viewer can focus on a birthday
cake candle, the person blowing it out, or partygoers in the background.
These "living pictures," as they're called, even let the viewer look a
bit behind the closest objects. The effect is a little like the
portraits in Harry Potter's newspaper: a hint of depth where you weren't
expecting it.
The Lytro Illum, which goes on sale
Friday for $1,599, makes this mind-bending technology remarkably
accessible to avid photographers. But you have to work within some
technical and artistic constraints. Over a week testing the Illum, I
took striking portraits and close-up shots that appear to come alive,
but struggled to get as much use out of it for landscapes and action
scenes.
The Illum offers great tools for
experimenting, but remains a ways off from being essential for serious
photographers. The jury is still out on whether light-field cameras will
define a compelling new kind of photography, or be remembered as a fun
gimmick.
If the name Lytro sounds
familiar, that's because Illum is the company's second attempt at a
camera that can do these kinds of tricks. Its first, just called Lytro, came out in 2012
and failed to catch on despite a wave of attention and a relatively low
$400 price tag. That camera—a 4.4-inch-long tube that looked more like a
colorful toy than a cutting-edge instrument—stayed under the radar
because it had poor image quality and was hard to control via a tiny
screen.
Lytro's reboot follows the
counterintuitive path of quadrupling the price and redesigning the
product for people accustomed to DSLRs. The Illum actually looks like a
camera, with a big 8X optical zoom lens fixed on the front and four
times the resolution of its predecessor. You control shutter speed,
exposure and other image factors through a tiltable 4-inch touch screen
on back. When I walked around with the Illum, the camera's
near-futuristic lines prompted bystanders to compliment it.
The Lytro Illum, on sale this week, retails for $1,600.
Lytro
Behind the lens, the Illum's sensor
captures a lot more information about a scene than the typical camera,
including the path the light takes on its way through the lens. Though
it has just one sensor that captures one image, think of it essentially
as a 3-D camera, taking shots at every possible focal point. From that
moment's data, you can create an interactive image that feels like a
video, where the viewer gets to choose the focus and perspective. Or you
can extract a single 4-megapixel image—half the resolution of an iPhone 5S photo, but good enough for a 5x7 print—with your desired point of focus.
There's
a learning curve to capturing images that take advantage of the Illum's
capabilities, but by my third day, I was taking decent shots. When
you're composing an image with the Illum, you have to think in terms of
depth—what's near and what's far. The more dispersed your subjects are,
the more interesting the shot.
To help you create shots with more
artful blurring, Illum has a special "Lytro" button; press it, and the
camera colors parts of the live image preview on its screen with shades
of blue (near) and orange (far). You can adjust the amount of each in a
shot by changing the center of focus, using the zoom or just moving the
camera around.
I found that close-up
portraits of people or pets generally have enough dimension to produce
interesting images that make you feel closer to the subject. And busy
images—parties, gardens, street scenes, markets—are great for letting
you shift focus, concentrating on different parts of a scene.
Landscapes
are much harder. I went to the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day to
practice, thinking that its layers of towers, cables and fog would be
perfect for the Illum's depth effect. I couldn't have been more wrong.
My shots turned out flat, like those of a regular camera.
When
I showed my boring bridge images to Casey McCallister, Lytro's creative
content manager, he explained that on such a massive scale, the entire
bridge scene was at a point photographers call infinity—that is, beyond
my ability to shift focus. Under those conditions, I should have put
another object—a tree, sign or another person—within 4 feet of me, to
add usable dimension. (Lytro offers tutorial videos online.)
Soon enough, I found myself looking
at scenes differently. Instead of clearing obstructions out of the way, I
was adding them in. Power lines, plants and fire hydrants all work. Try
turning your family into mobile props.
The
Illum's screen lags just enough from reality that it was hard to use it
in action situations. Still, the camera can capture 2.5 photos per
second. Like midrange digital SLRs, it also has challenges with night
shooting, producing grainy images. And shooting outdoors on sunny days
can be difficult, as the LCD screen can be hard to see.
The
magic happens once you move the Illum's giant 53-megabyte image files
to the Lytro Desktop editing software. (Warning: Working with so much
data in a single image requires a workhorse of a computer, and even then
is slow.)
The program lets you make
basic photo adjustments such as exposure, color saturation, sharpening
and cropping. You can also choose to highlight a single point, blurring
all the rest, or bring everything, foreground and background, into
focus. You can export these images as flat JPEGs, images that can be
seen on 3-D TVs and monitors, or short videos that tell a story by
shifting focus and perspective.
The most
interesting option is to turn shots into what Lytro calls living
pictures. This allows the viewer to change the focus or perspective
themselves in real time on Lytro's website or mobile app and other
photo-sharing sites like 500px.com.
Illum
undoubtedly advances photography in an era where most other high-end
camera-makers make only incremental improvements. But what good are
these new capabilities in the hands of artists and photo enthusiasts?
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