LaptopMag has posted a video of the plenoptic lens technology that Adobe demonstrated during the GTC2010 keynote, showing a single snapshop of a girl in a field and how they are then able to dynamically change the focus in the after the photo.

First, the lens’ optics atomize the picture in thousands of tiny versions of the scene, all different from each other, at different angles and positions. When you add these lenses to your DSLR camera, the sensor would capture a huge grid of images made of all these little images. The effect is similar to the eyes of a fly.

Then, the software can take this grid and combine the versions into a single one. Using a simple slider, you can change the focus of the image in any way you want, picking any plane you desire to be in perfect, crystal-clear focus.

Gizmodo mistakenly says Adobe “invented” the technology, and simply calls the whole system “Plenoptic”.  In reality, Plentoptic is a type of lens also known as a polydioptric which is actually a multitude of lenses working together (refer to the Wikipedia article) and the technology that Adobe was demonstrating was first developed and demonstrated by Stanford back in 2009.  Adobe’s contribution was in moving it to GPU-compute, so that the internal processing comes down from hours to fractions of a second.

via ENHANCE! (How Adobe Will Let You Take Perfectly Focused Images Every Time).

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