News.blog: A new focus for photographers

It's one of the oldest, most common problems in photography: that picture you thought would be the prize shot is out of focus.

Refocus Imaging, a Silicon Valley start-up, thinks its technology can be used to make cameras that can fix that problem -- after you take the photo.

By fitting a camera's image sensor with a special lens and then processing the resulting data with new methods, Refocus Imaging's technology will let photographers fix their photos and exercise new creative control after the shutter is released, founder and chief executive Ren Ng said.

"There's a lot of physical stuff in the camera that is limiting its performance," Ng said. "What we're doing is to capture much more than a two-dimensional photograph inside the camera... By collecting the light, we can process it in software to do what the hardware usually has to do."

And the technology boosts some aspects of camera performance in the process, he said. Ng said he hopes to licence it to camera companies, and boasts that Refocus Imaging's patent portfolio is "very, very good".

The technology, which stems from Ng's research at Stanford University, is an example of computational photography, which augments traditional image capture with computers -- either in the camera or on a PC -- to achieve new possibilities.

Included below and here are examples from Refocus Imaging that show how the technology works. The slider on the right of each graphic can be used to change the point of focus from foreground elements to those in the background, or clicking on a different area will bring it into focus.

Ng also showed the technology off at the 6sight digital-imaging conference in November.