Taking aim at far-from-perfect photos

A moment in time — or not
A commonly cited innovation, an interactive digital photomontage technique that Agarwala and colleagues at the University of Washington and Microsoft produced about four years ago, has since made its way into Photoshop Elements 6.0 as the Photomerge feature.

Say you’re at a party with your friends and family. At least one person is guaranteed to be making a strange face on the group photo. It’s especially likely with a camera that samples only one-sixtieth of a second of the celebration. Why not sample more widely and take the best part of each image — the basis of the photomontage technique?

“In the end, you’re depicting a moment in time that never actually existed, but in a sense it’s more real because it’s how you remembered it,” Agarwala said.

What constitutes reality could be vigorously debated, of course, but a properly rendered montage arguably makes a better keepsake.

The same software, Agarwala said, could theoretically be included on a camera itself. “The idea is to get beyond the limitation of photography, which is that it samples one moment in time.”

Similarly, a photographer could take a barrage of photos of the Grand Canyon or some other tourist attraction over a period of time, and then use a function that chooses the most probable color for each pixel to seamlessly erase the sporadic tourists ruining the view.

That concept has since been incorporated into the Photoshop Elements Scene Cleaner function, but could likewise be added to a camera in the future.

'Frankencameras' see the light
What isn’t happening yet, Stanford’s Levoy said, is enough research on techniques that require a modification of the cameras themselves or that change its internal programming.

Now, photographers can set the exposure and aperture and take the picture. “They can’t typically focus the camera, change the zoom, they can’t do anything in real time.”

If they could, what would such a camera look like?

Some camera manufacturers may start incorporating more features on their own. Casio’s EX-F1 digital camera, which can take a rapid-fire burst of photos at 60 frames per second, has been among the few to do so thus far by allowing users to combine multiple photos into a final image.

“It aligns and merges them together to take a sharp picture in a dark room that you normally couldn’t do without a flash,” Levoy said. Ditto for a panning image of a subject in motion, like an in-focus action shot of a speeding motorcyclist.

Alternatively, researchers may be able to find a better platform for all the bells and whistles. If cell phone cameras continue to improve optically, Levoy said, “they could begin to destroy the bottom of the camera market.”

His lab’s own research with an early prototype dubbed “Frankencamera” may help that trend along. The composite of camera parts and an over-sized viewfinder could help the research community find more flexible platforms able to incorporate the flood of new features being envisioned.

“Our goal is to try to create a platform for students in computational photography courses within two years,” Levoy said.

The platform would boast an open-source, Linux-based operating system to boost creativity and productivity. “The key idea here is that we want it programmable completely, right down to how it moves the focus and zoom motors.”

Changing digital photography
Agarwala said he’s also begun working on an open-source prototype of his own that is still little more than a camera linked to a laptop. Like Levoy, he agreed that a move toward such platforms could spur the creation of multiple cell phone-like applications.

As one example, Agarwala cited an add-on that could help with rephotography. The technique, commonly used for before-and-after historical photos, tries to replicate the exact conditions of an original photograph at the same site, only much later in time.

“It’s a really great way to document things like a glacier melting for global warming,” he said. “But it’s actually really hard to do. There are six degrees of freedom that you have to search across. In theory, an algorithm can do it much better.”

As an application on a camera, a rephotography aid could analyze the original photo and instruct the photographer how to shift the camera to best match the view.

The coming changes may not be limited to cameras. Levoy said a revolution is underway in scientific imaging as well. His lab is working with the technique of light field imaging, which captures the whole field of incoming light, including detailed directional information about that light.

The extra data could allow a viewer to refocus an image well after its picture has been taken through either a camera or a microscope, so that a magnified object’s appearance might be easily seen from different angles.

All told, the innovations may fundamentally change what it means to take a digital picture. With multiple ways of enhancing an image rapidly coming online, Freeman said, “the photographic record is no longer the final thing, it’s just data.”

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