California-based Lytro company produces and commercializes the eponymously-named mild field camera, a device that lets you capture and share your photographs in a whole new way. Lytro camera routinely captures all parts of the scene in detail so your image can be dedicated to one or multiple sections after being taken. It’s the first consumer camera that records the entire light field instead of a flat 2D image.
A light field consists of all light rays traveling in all directions in a very scene, thus totally defining every aspect of the actual way it appears. While traditional digicam sensors ‘tabulate’ all the lighting rays and report them as a one amount of light, the Lytro sensor captures the color, intensity, as well as vector direction of all sun light of light. By doing this, you can do incredible things, like refocus pictures after you take them. The camera eradicates the need for focusing through image capture, and offers the freedom to choose throughout post-processing which parts of the picture should be in emphasis thanks to shallow depth of field. Tap the touchscreen on whatever part of the picture you want to bring into focus — or, once a picture is imported into your computer, click to refocus. Refocusing lets you experience a picture differently with each click. It’s like walking through the scene all over again. So now every picture you take is a chance to compose a new story.
The free Lytro Desktop application lets you import your living pictures to your computer and easily share them online. Once shared, your friends can see and refocus your pictures online — with no special plug-ins, software or anything else. Your pictures are going to be very popular. Being camera’s characteristics reliant primarily on software sets of rules rather than mechanical components, new features – such as Instagram-like filters or “all in focus” option – are little by little developed and made available for free update to improve the Lytro’s performance.