Lytro Light Field Camera Gets Filters, Perspective Shift

Lytro this week announced a few new creative tools for its Light Field Camera.

On Dec. 4, the camera maker will release the Perspective Shift technology, as well as a number of new Living Filters, available for free via a Lytro Desktop software update.

Perspective Shift puts Lytro photographers even more in control, allowing them to interactively change the point of view in an image that has already been taken. On a PC, smartphone, or tablet, viewers can slightly move what Lytro calls the "living picture" in any direction — left, right, up, down.

The technology follows the photo to the Web, Facebook, and Twitter, where anyone can change perspective, without any special software.

"By capturing the light field, the Lytro camera lets photographers achieve things that were never before possible," Ren Ng, founder of Lytro, said in a statement. "The first groundbreaking capability was focusing pictures after they were taken and now we are excited to offer Perspective Shift, which brings living pictures to life in an entirely new way."

Lytro's own Trey Ratcliff, a landscape photographer and pro-shooter team member, vouched for the camera's updated features.

"I've had a wonderful time running around with my Lytro camera to grab little scenes and bend them into this new way of seeing living photos," he said in a statement. "The idea that you can take any little scene and make it like interactive Matrix-bullet-time is really cool."

Lytro is also introducing a new way to enhance photos with Living Filters — a sort of Instagram for the interactive camera.

Any one of nine different filters — carnival, crayon, glass, line art, mosaic, blur+, pop, film noir, 8-track — can be applied to images to change their look based on light field depth.

"Having the ability to play with tiles of your living pictures while you refocus with Mosaic or to give an evening shot more drama with Film Noir will let Lytro camera owners and their friends and family have even more fun with the light field and the living pictures it creates," Lytro's director of photography, Eric Cheng, said in a statement.

Perspective Shift and the Living Filters work retroactively, turning any previously shot Lytro photo into a new experience.

The Lytro Light Field Camera already received some , adding control over the shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, natural density, and auto exposure, aimed at boosting user control over the device.

For more, see PCMag's and the slideshow above. Also, check out Lytro's video below to see Perspective Shift in action.