Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world’s first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.

One developer created a tool that can turn video footage into refocus-able stills. Toshiba and a company called DigitalOptics are both working to build Lytro-style smartphone camera modules. Next week, there’s going to be a new contender: an app called FocusTwist.
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Yahoo! just released a new weather app that takes advantage of beautiful photos provided by the company’s Flickr community to pair in depth weather information with gorgeous photos of your city experiencing similar weather. The idea is that users don’t just want to know the weather (numerically speaking), they want to see it. Read more…

The Android operating system has been expanding beyond the world of smartphones and into the realm of “smartcameras” as of late, but did you know that by doing so it has simply gone full circle? That’s right: Android was originally intended for digital cameras rather than for phones.
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When Google acquired Nik Software back in September, the photographic community took it as a sign that the internet giant was focusing more intently on our passion. But last week, when Google announced it would be pulling support for the desktop version of Nik’s popular mobile editor Snapseed, the same people wondered if this spelled the end of the rest of Nik’s well-respected suite of plugins.

Fortunately, the opposite is the case. Google may have pulled their support for the desktop version of Snapseed, but the remaining offerings from Nik are not only still available, they will be sold in a record-low-priced bundle. Read more…

Adobe is pushing hard towards cloud services and digital distribution. Its Creative Cloud software subscription service appears to be on a tear, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying monthly fees for always-updated software that traditionally came in boxes that carry hefty price tags.

Earlier this year, Adobe acquired portfolio service Behance in order to make the Creative Cloud more social, and now the company is making another bold move as it heads more and more toward the cloud: it will soon stop selling boxed copies of its Creative Suite software altogether.
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Film emulation software company VSCO has added another offering to its lineup of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw plugins. VSCO Film offers the same high-end film emulation power as Film 01 and 02, except it’s designed for mimicking the look of instant films rather than standard color and black-and-white film stocks.
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Starting today, you can download a free and legal copy of Photoshop. That’s right — free and legal. There’s a catch, though: it’s the original 1.0.1 version of the program that was released back in 1990.
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Talking to computers is one of the exciting new trends that’s emerging in the tech world, and in the future we may find ourselves casually talking to our gadgets as we go about our lives. One application of this that you may never have considered is photo editing: what if you could post-process your photographs simply by telling an image editor what you would like done to the images?

That’s exactly what scientists are currently working on, and the research is further along than you might think. They’re already playing around with a prototype version of an app — one called PixelTone.
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When shopping online, you’ve probably seen options for entering promo and discount codes during the checkout stage. Most of the time, however, you probably don’t have a suitable code to use for knocking some dollars off the purchase price. Scouring the web can sometimes do the trick, but it’s difficult to sift through the noise and find working codes.

If the experience we just described is all too familiar to you, then you should check out Honey. It’s a new browser extension that’s designed to save you money by finding and applying promo codes for you.
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If you’ve been thinking about buying a copy of Apple’s Aperture 3 for your post-processing work, you might want to hold off for a bit. A replacement may be on the near horizon — at least according to a new book listing that has popped up over on Amazon Canada.
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