Adobe offers sneak peek at photography’s future
Source: Business 2.0
Written by Jon Fortt
A few days ago, two of the brightest minds from Adobe Systems (ADBE) dropped by my office to give me a rare and exciting look at what the software maker is cooking up in its imaging labs.
In the couple of hours we spent together, I learned that Adobe doesn’t just want to revolutionize photo editing. It wants to revolutionize cameras.
My guests were Martin Newell, an Adobe Fellow in the Advanced Technology Group; and Dave Story, vice president of product development in the Digital Imaging group. I’ll highlight two groupings of technology they showed me.
The first was the beginnings of a facial identification system that could one day tell you in an instant whether a group portrait is “good” or not, based on things like whether any faces are obscured, and whether anyone is blinking, sneezing, or looking at something other than the camera.
The second was a new type of camera lens array that could presage a day when out-of-focus photos become a thing of the past. Its honeycomb design allows it to focus on multiple points in a scene at once.
(The Adobe folks emphasized that these features in ideas are not necessarily planned for a future version of Photoshop. But personally, I think if these things are cool enough for them to show off, you might expect to see them show up in some form over the next few years.)