Steve Weinrebe's Mode Studio

PDN reports on an interesting video featured at the French blog, AudioBlog.fr, of Adobe’s Dave Story discussing some interesting new 3D technology. The video is well worth watching for fans of Photoshop and photography. For myself, having seen many attempts at bringing 3D to the masses and having been a student of holography back in the mid nineteen-seventies, I am both thrilled and skeptical when new 3D technology surfaces, especially since ultimately 3D needs to be achieved in a video surround space to be fully implemented, and anything short of that is just, well, short of that.

Adobe’s technology involves a bug-eye lens; multiple individual lenses cemented together into a concave whole, that allows multiple views, and apparently multiple planes of focus, in a single capture. The latter is really the more interesting part of this, since the amount of 3D adjustment demonstrated in the video appeared limited (similar to lenticular screening devices).

About half way through the presentation Story demonstrates a “Focus brush” which allows for painting focus, or un-focus, onto the photograph. That technology was more interesting to me, and I’m curious if Adobe will develop a way to apply that to non-3D images. Of course a similar effect could be accomplished by taking multiple captures at different focuses, adding them to a multi-layered document, and using layer masks to reveal or hide selected portions of the image. In any case, the “Focus brush” looks promising. Check the video out here.

Footnote to AudioBlog.fr, I’d like to see what Dave Story speaks about after this video, which is cut just as he starts to discuss “unethical image manipulation.”
Posted by Steve Weinrebe