Camera

Camera

The light field controls. Each can be animated: the ◆ at the right of a setting adds or removes its keyframes and moves between them (see Animation).

Depth

• Aperture: f/22 to f/0.5. Small apertures keep everything sharp; wide ones blur what is away from the focus (click the picture to choose what is in focus). Beyond f/2, the widest the camera can record, the blur is synthetic, using the depth map.
• Depth: how quickly things blur away from the focus.
• Smoothing: smooths the depth map, following the picture's edges.
• Lytro Desktop depth map: shown for photos imported from a Lytro Desktop library. On, the depth map Lytro Desktop computed (or the one edited there) is used for blur and depth masks; off, depth is measured from the light field as for any other photo. Lytro's map is usually the better one where the picture is blank or out of focus, such as a plain wall behind the subject.
• Object edges: finds the objects in the photo and puts the depth map's edges on their outlines, so depth steps are clean instead of blocky. It works with or without High quality depth map. The first time it is turned on, it downloads an object model (about 45 MB, kept afterwards); finding the objects takes several seconds per photo.
• High quality depth map: sharper depth edges that match the photo, and depth found even on far, very out-of-focus surfaces (a textured wall behind the subject), about two to three times as slow to measure. On by default; off, the faster, blockier depth map is used.
• Show depth map: warm colors are near, cool colors are far.
• Greyscale: (next to Show depth map) shows the depth map in grey instead of in color, light for near and dark for far.
• Depth map contrast: stretches the depth map's colors over a narrower range of depth, so small differences show more (Lytro Desktop's depth maps look this way). It only changes how the depth map is shown, not the depth.

Focus Spread

• Focus Point: where you last clicked; spread and tilt are centered there.
• Spread: a range of depth kept sharp on each side of the focus.
• Smoothing: softens the edges of that range, so blur builds up gradually.
• Blur: blurs the sharp range itself as well; Smoothing's gradual blur still builds up on top of it past the range.
• Show spread: tints what lies outside it, blue nearer and orange farther.

Tilt

Tilts the plane of focus, like a tilt-shift lens: Tilt is the amount, Rotation the direction. Enabled turns the tilt off and on without losing the settings.

Show tilt tints the picture by how far each part lies from the tilted plane of focus, blue nearer and orange farther, clear where it is in focus. It and Show spread switch each other off.

Perspective

Viewpoint shows where the viewpoint is (drag on the picture to move it), as a share of the lens aperture across and down; Center is the middle.

Moving the viewpoint shifts every depth but one, the focus plane (or, with the aperture closed, the depth the camera focused on). Custom pivot and Pivot depth choose another depth to stay still.

Bokeh

The shape of out-of-focus highlights: Natural, Optical (softer), Circle or Blades, and Highlights to make bright points glow into bokeh balls.

• Blades (Blades shape): the number of aperture blades, 3 to 12, which is the number of sides of each bokeh ball.
• Oval (Circle shape): stretches the circle into an oval, like the cat's-eye bokeh near the edges of a fast lens.
• Rotation (Circle and Blades): turns the blades or the oval.
• Onion (Circle and Blades): concentric rings inside each bokeh ball, like those from aspherical lens elements.