Digital Photography and Image-Based Editing (Computational Photography and Video)

Digital photography has already dramatically changed the ease with which we take and share pictures. We strongly believe that digital photography will also bring a second revolution: The flexibility of digital processing has the potential to greatly improve the quality of pictures. The engineering of traditional cameras, lenses and films has reached impressive results, but has always been limited by the strong constraints of chemistry, optics and analog processes. This led master photographers to create a rich craft and to spend hours to finalize each print, relying on skills that are out of reach of most users. This is even more true for motion pictures, where the sheer number of frames makes the production of quality movies the privilege of a few professionals. With the advent of digital cameras, most of these constraints disappear and the processing possibilities are endless. Powerful image enhancement techniques inspired by physical and phenomenological computer graphics methods can be applied to the data of the sensor in order to generate more compelling pictures.