Bokeh Photography on iOS – “Tadaa SLR” brings Nokia Refocus features to iPhone and iPad

Camera capabilities in smartphones have been taking lead on digital photography features in dedicated cameras and even consumer DSLRs. Thanks to the app ecosystem that lets developers do their innovation parts while the technology takes them along.

Announced later last month, the iOS app Tadaa SLR brings the capability to focus object later after you have captured the picture via your iPhone or iPad’s camera. The app itself provides the camera UI to take picture and gives you the options to focus object later with a masking tool.

With the simple user interface, the app helps you to take a picture and then choose a part of the frame which you want to focus with the help of a masking tool. A “Detect Edges” feature helps you to rough select object, the tool detects edges and selects the object almost finely.

Blur options include “All” which blurs out everything in the frame leaving the selected part of the frame. Other “circular” and “Linear” options seems more natural to the real function of depth-of-field.

In addition the brightness, contrast and saturation controls are provided for a little bit of tricking with the color enhancements.

When we tried with the app on our iDevice, we did find it a little helper with focusing wanted objects and blurring out the unwanted objects in the background. However we can not call it the real depth-of-field handler as it would do with a DSLR lens to blur out everything before and after the main object. Tadaa DSLR will focus a part while blurring the parts around the main object rather than before and after the object.

Linear and Circular function in selecting focused object is much better toward the real looking depth-of-field anyway and presents a good feel of photo captured by a consumer DSLR.

When Nokia announced about “Nokia Refocus” app, the same thing we were curious to know for it that how would it do to simulate the real optical lens system for depth of field after the picture has been shot. But later we found that it was more nearer to the actual function which a lens performs optically. Nokia Refocus takes multiple shots at different focus ranges from nearer the camera to infinity while Tadaa SLR takes only one shot. In the race of smartphones and app ecosystem, there is a need to mention that earlier than the Tadaa SLR release, Nokia had announced the Nokia Refocus for the similar task to do on their Lumia smartphone.

Tadaa SLR is optimized for iPhone only, however it works well in iPad in lower size and if you have a jailbroked iPad with FullForce app installed you will have the option to double the size of any app that has not been optimized for iPad.

Download Tadaa SLR from App Store. Use it and give your comments below if you like it or you also have to say something about real depth-of-field and the Tadaa SLR relationship.