Nokia Refocus now available for Nokia Lumia

Nokia Refocus is a cutting edge imaging app that lets you capture first and then focus and re-focus later to produce interactive photos that can be shared on Facebook, which your friends can adjust as well. It’s available today!

Part of the battle when taking photos is making sure everything is in focus. Nokia Refocus does that hard work for you and even more.

Try Nokia Refocus for yourself, tap on various points in the image below and watch the magic happen.

Focus

Nokia Refocus is designed for scenes with a great contrast in the depth of field, like macro shots. Here’s how you use it.

First focus on the object that’s the closest to you, and as you look through the viewfinder with your camera, it will look blurry. However, move the camera closer to the object and everything becomes clear. This is to help you know how close you can go before you take the shot.

Once you have the closest object in focus, tapping the screen on your Lumia will start the capture process – which only takes a couple of seconds (try to be very still). During this time, Nokia Refocus performs a ‘focus sweep’ and creates a depth map.

This new way of taking photos is a great example of computational photography. We’ve now got the ability to change a photo once it’s taken and have a photo that simply couldn’t have been taken by a traditional camera.

The result is a series of 2-8 images, depending on what’s in view, each at five megapixels at a different focus that’ll be aligned and forged together to make one image.

By tapping on any part of this final image you’ll be able to shift the focus to that particular part. The great thing here is that you can achieve a variety of different shots from just the one photo.

Want to focus on the flower in the foreground? No problem, just tap it. What about that building the background? Tap that, instead!

By also being able to focus on everything, the Nokia Refocus app can also put the whole scene into focus at the same time to provide extra clarity; that includes the object only inches away from the lens. Not even a DSLR can do that.

Colour pop

As if focusing wasn’t enough, there’s another fun element to Nokia Refocus. Colour pop has been a hugely popular feature in previous Nokia apps, such as Nokia Creative Studio, and it also comes to Nokia Refocus.

Selecting the dropper icon on the right of the viewfinder you’re initiating colour pop. Tap on the screen where you want to focus and the colour in that section will remain while the rest of the picture will turn to black and white, adjusting the contrast slightly as it does.

Sharing

When you’ve taken a photo with Nokia Refocus and had fun experimenting with different focus points, you can also share the results with your friends.

The photo is initially uploaded to your SkyDrive, and then a unique page over at refocus.nokia.com is created. Here you can see the image in full resolution and also at full screen for a better experience. Additionally you can share using email, SMS or Facebook.

What’s really fun here is your friends can not only see the photo you’ve taken, but also interact with it and refocus the same photo directly from within your Facebook news feed.

Nokia Refocus is available now to download exclusively for Nokia Lumia PureView smartphones, such as the Nokia Lumia 920, Lumia 925, Lumia 928 and Lumia 1020 (with Amber installed). It will also be available for your new Lumia 1520.

Tell us what you think of Nokia Refocus, below.