Yesterday Lytro announced that it’s pushed another firmware update for its light field camera. Now users have Perspective Shift and Living Filters at their disposal, in addition to the device’s blur-and-focus technology.
Perspective Shift is a post-production new capability that allows you to drag a picture around from your browser or smartphone. “When pictures with Perspective Shift are shared to the Web, Facebook, and Twitter, friends can experience [it] without needing any special software,” Lytro says. The feature is also compatible will all previously-taken Lytro pictures floating around out there.
You can give it a try for yourself in the linked gallery below; the first reaction we had is that it’s certainly interesting if limited – you can’t drag the image for perspective change as much as you might like.
Live Filters allow you to instantly change a photo’s aesthetic overlay. Lytro has introduced nine, including Film Noir, Carnival, and Crayon. You can click around to experience these filters and watch as they update before your eyes. These updates will be also available December 4, but until then you can play around with them via the Lytro gallery.
Since launching last year, Lytro continues to roll out firmware upgrades and features slowly but surely. The camera is undeniably an interesting one, and has grabbed plenty of attention, but it hasn’t quite convinced buyers it’s more than a novelty item. We’re still only looking at the first hardware iteration of Lytro, however, and we know a future version will include Wi-Fi capabilities and – fingers crossed – we’re hoping for a larger sensor, better equipped for dark settings.
Still, what the Lytro team has been able to churn out in the past year is impressive to say the least, and it’s certainly putting new technologies into consumers’ hands, as well as giving us the chance to experience digital photography as viewers in a new way.
