In this week’s #AskWSJD, reader Daniel Fujii asks if there are any smartphone apps that mimic the new HTC One M8‘s uFocus camera feature, which lets users adjust the focus of a photo after it’s been shot. The HTC pulls this off by using a two-camera setup, with one camera dedicated to recording depth info.
Unfortunately for Daniel and anyone else who doesn’t buy the newest HTC One, there are no apps for phones running iOS, Android or even Windows Phone that offer the same feature. There are plenty of great photo apps out there that offer a feature called “tilt-shift,” however, that blur certain parts of a picture to simulate the effect of refocusing a photo.
Our top choices: TiltShift Generator on iOS, Awesome Miniature on Android, and—on either operating system—Snapseed (Android, iOS) and Instagram (Android, iOS). For Windows Phone, there’s Tilt Shift.
If you own an iPhone and want to take your smartphone photo editing beyond tilt-shift, there are plenty of other apps to check out: VSCOcam (which is also available on Android) has become popular for its photo filters, Mextures enables you to create “formulas” from 130 different options of light leaks, grain and color gradients, and Camera+ offers a broad range of editing features with iCloud syncing too.
For interesting focus tricks, another option is the Lytro camera, which uses an entirely different approach called light-field photography to allow you to change the focus of already-snapped photos. Lytro cameras use special sensors to capture not only the light hitting a lens, but also the direction of the light. The result is essentially a three-dimensional data capture that allows images to be manipulated after the fact using Lytro’s special software.
The entry-level Lytro camera sells for $249, and soon the company will release a higher-end, DSLR-like camera called the Illum that will sell for $1,599—far more expensive than any smartphone app out there. Picking up a Lytro also means carrying around another device, which isn’t ideal either.
If you’d like to ask us a question, you can it directly to the Personal Tech team at personaltech@wsj.com, or send a tweet with the question and the hashtag #AskWSJD. You can also film yourself asking the question in 15 seconds or less, and upload it via YouTube, Instagram, Vine, Facebook or some other online video platform. We look forward to hearing from you, and helping you out!
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