Pictures Posing Questions: Science News Online, April 7, 2007

Pictures Posing Questions: Science News Online, April 7, 2007: "When a celebrity appears in a fan-magazine photo, there's no telling whether the person ever wore the clothes depicted or visited that locale. The picture may have been 'photoshopped,' we say, using a word coined from the name of the popular image-editing software, Adobe Photoshop.

In one new aspect of computational photography, a dome contains hundreds of precisely positioned flash units. A high-speed camera captures a frame as each flash fires in sequence. Computers can then relight the scene as they reconstruct it.
Debevec/University of Southern California
But today's image processing is just a prelude. Imagine photographs in which the lighting in the room, the position of the camera, the point of focus, and even the expressions on people's faces were all chosen after the picture was taken. The moment that the picture beautifully captures never actually happened. Welcome to the world of computational photography, arguably the biggest step in photography since the move away from film. "