> While it is still speculation until next week, I think it's reasonable to be skeptic about its ability to use produce bokeh on images with no detected faces.
That shouldn't be a limitation in the technology though, just a implementation detail. Emulating DoF would work whether you have a face in the photo or not, it's just easier to lock on to a face as your primary focus.
I'm thinking that if they still let you tap to select what to base the brightness on in this mode, they might be able to extend that to the focus so that it can work with non-face photos. Keep the part you tap on in focus (and anything else at that distance), blur the rest. Though that might not allow you to do independent brightness... Hmmm... Anyway, it's pure hope/speculation at this point.
I was thinking that this would be interesting for product photography but not sure whether it would work. For example, if I'm shooting a row of coffee cups for the side (diagonally) but want the front cup to be in focus and rest in the row gradually going out of focus.
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The point being Apple uses algorithm to detect face to 'compute' the depth of field - would the same work for any random object? I'm not sure about this.
stereo depth still has a lot of issues - eg. if you're shooting a white wall or other feature-less object. Not sure if they have better algos but if you use an off-the-shelf stereo package from OpenCV or ROS there are lots of holes in the depth map even in ideal cases.
They probably focus on the portrait application because it has the least amount of corner cases.
That shouldn't be a limitation in the technology though, just a implementation detail. Emulating DoF would work whether you have a face in the photo or not, it's just easier to lock on to a face as your primary focus.