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Get Lytro-like refocusing with the FocusTwist app

This Lytro-style app is coming to a smartphone near you soon, allowing users to refocus images after they have been taken.

Lexy Savvides Principal Video Producer
Lexy is an on-air presenter and award-winning producer who covers consumer tech, including the latest smartphones, wearables and emerging trends like assistive robotics. She's won two Gold Telly Awards for her video series Beta Test. Prior to her career at CNET, she was a magazine editor, radio announcer and DJ. Lexy is based in San Francisco.
Expertise Wearables, smartwatches, mobile phones, photography, health tech, assistive robotics Credentials
  • Webby Award honoree, 2x Gold Telly Award winner
Lexy Savvides

This Lytro-style app is coming to a smartphone near you soon, allowing users to refocus images after they have been taken.

(Screenshot by CBSi)

The Lytro camera uses light-field technology to acquire a photo, capturing the colour, intensity and vector direction of light. This lets users refocus images after they have been taken, either in-camera or on a computer.

A new app called FocusTwist will bring a similar functionality to smartphones. As revealed to photography blog PetaPixel, the app captures lots of photos at different focus points and merges them together, resulting in an image that can be refocused.

Like the Lytro images, FocusTwist lets you click around an image to change the point of focus. The app will be available on iOS initially, and aims to launch this week. Examples of resulting images are provided below. Click around the images to change the point of focus.

(Credit: FocusTwist)

(Credit: FocusTwist)

Since Lytro took the photography world by storm at the end of 2011, a number of different contenders have emerged, aiming to bring the same capability to smartphones. Toshiba is readying a refocusing technology using hundreds of thousands of tiny lenses, while DigitalOptics has already showed off a working module that uses a similar method of multiple image capture as FocusTwist.