Lytro releases massive updates for its ILLUM camera and desktop software

Lytro has released updates for its Lytro ILLUM light field camera and accompanying Lytro Desktop software. The update provides a number of new interactive and editing features designed to make the light field photography workflow more intuitive.

For its Lytro ILLUM 2.0 software, Lytro has included ‘living picture playback’ on the camera and has updated the camera’s touchscreen UI to more easily view and change the ILLUM’s settings.

Lytro’s Interactive Living Picture consists of the ability to create a moving image by setting interactive focusing points, adjusting the virtual aperture and applying a perspective shift to the image. Previously, this was only able to be done via Lytro’s desktop software. With Lytro ILLUM’s 2.0 update, you can do this directly on the camera, ensuring you know exactly what you’ll get when you import the images to your computer.

 

A clockwise two-finger gesture on the camera’s Playback Screen opens the aperture to a maximum of f1; the opposite counter clockwise gesture tightens the Virtual Aperture to f16.

In its Lytro Desktop 4.3 update, Lytro has sped up importing of images, included the ability to edit an image’s depth map, included a 3D side-by-side image animation, included the ability for lenticular printing and enabled native image editing in Adobe Photoshop.

Of the above features, one of of the most welcomed in Lytro’s desktop software is the ability to edit an image’s depth map. As impressive as the Lytro ILLUM is at creating accurate depth maps of images, almost every image has a few places where a piece of a foreground subject might be seen as the background. Now, you can touch up the depth map to more accurately adjust an image.

The two new exporting options are also an impressive addition, as Lytro’s value in the virtual reality world are becoming more evident. The new 3D side-by-side image animation enables you to export stereoscopic side-by-side 3D animations directly from Lytro Desktop, which can then be played in virtual reality devices such as Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus.

 

Export a full color stereoscopic animation that can be viewed in virtual reality head mounted displays. All keyframed animations created will be exported in the 3D stereo movie file.

Lenticular printing automatically exports a series of images with a specified focus range for the creation of full color 3D prints through a lenticular print vendor.

Arguably the most interesting of the features now included in Lytro Desktop is the ability to edit image stacks, with individual layers, natively in Adobe Photoshop. Just edit the layers you want, save the file and the edits are automatically applied to the Living Picture in Lytro Desktop.

This marks the twelfth update since Lytro released the Lytro Illum over a year ago. You can download Lytro ILLUM 2.0 by clicking here and Lytro Desktop 4.3 by clicking here.