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Google's New Camera App Lets You Add Lens Blur to Your Pictures

By Hafeez Sim - on 17 Apr 2014, 2:11pm

Google's New Camera App Lets You Add Lens Blur to Your Pictures

 Source: Google Research Blog

It's difficult to find Android users using the vanilla camera app, since many Android phone manufacturers replace it with their own variants. But things may change soon with Google releasing the latest version on the Play Store. Devices with Android 4.4 (KitKat) under the hood can run the Google Camera app, which comes with a new 'Lens Blur' feature that lets you adds creamy bokeh to your pictures. The Google Research Blog revealed that there's quite a fair bit of algorithms running to achieve this effect; to put it in a nutshell, computer vision algorithms create a 3D model of the world based on the shots you have taken, and estimate the depth to every point in the scene. This lets you create a very shallow depth-of-field, similar to shooting with a very wide aperture.

Users will have to capture a series of shots vertically, and the Lens Blur feature even lets you select the object in focus after the shot is taken, similar to the Lytro. Besides this feature, the app also provides users with a 100% field-of-view, and a larger capture button. Panorama shots can now be taken with higher resolution. If you're interested to find out more about the algorithms behind the Lens Blur feature, hit the Google Research Blog link below. 

Source: Google Research Blog via Engadget

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