In its determination to prove that it's taking phone photography ultra seriously, Nokia has today released the Refocus app, which lets you change the focus of photos after you've captured them.
When Refocus was unveiled at Nokia World in Abu Dhabi last month it was rather overshadowed by the show-stealing product launches, but a number of simultaneous announcements reiterated the company's commitment to blostering its imaging prowess.
To take advantage of Refocus, the camera will perform a focus sweep over the course of a couple of seconds. Using between two and eight 5-megapixel images captured during the sweep, the camera will create a depth map that can meld together different versions of the images so as to shift the focus into a different region of the shot. It's ideal for creating depth-of-field or macro photos.
Refocus can also perform more gimmicky editing exercises, such as colour pop, which allows you to choose one area of a photo to remain in colour while turning the rest of the shot black and white. If you upload your photo to SkyDrive -- still one of the worst things about sharing photos using a Windows Phone device -- and then post it to Facebook, your friends who see it in their news feeds -- presumably as the photo uploaded to SkyDrive retains the depth map within its metadata.
Refocus is available for all Nokia smartphones packing the company's spiffy PureView camera technology, providing they have installed the Amber that was recently pushed out automatically to users. The compatible phones are the Lumia 920, Lumia 925 and the Lumia 1020 -- and the app will of course be available for Nokia's upcoming Lumia 1520 phablet too.
Refocus has Nokia on a whirl wind hook. This app, has been said to perform the more "gimmicky" parts of the editing process. And one of the best sections is that even after you've taken the photo, you can re-focus the image. How incredible is that, usually you have to have the brackets in focus, yet now you can take a blurry photo and fix it to the premium idealist image you wanted.