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Comment by tempaway3345751 | Hacker News Reader

Thats great I've often thought that screenshots aren't blurry enough these days

Limiting depth of field is a very useful way to emphasize specific elements of a photograph and for that reason it's almost always used for portraits.

It also compensates for portrait photos being best taken from a distance using a telephoto lens. The reason those are best is because it captures the face people remember instead of the face they actually see. The reason compensation is needed is because the same lens configuration will get a much smaller depth-of-field up close but a much higher one at a distance.

Difference being, the face is the content, the background is noise. Here, the screenshot is the content. Ex. The only physical feature of my face i like is my eyes. Yet, it'd be weird if I depth of field'd everything but my eyes.

I'm sure this has uses but it's hard to argue it does from fundamentals of photography

Its real use is the few hours of fun I had making it, this is really a toy

There are lots of cases, especially in say marketing images, where the entire screenshot is not the content. You may want to highlight a specific bit of UI while still keeping the general background context instead of cropping into a small image.

This lets you click a portion of the screenshot to bring into focus.

At the end of the day it's a fun toy web app, but I don't think the general concept is useless.

Agreed, for the crowd, c.f. "I'm sure this has uses"

You can highlight certain elements of a screenshot.

I hadn't actually seen the demo when I commented! I'd assumed it was using an AI model to estimate distance from camera of the elements of a photograph and then reproducing a shallower depth-of-field. So my comment isn't all that relevant.

I hate it in any context. Blur is not natural to human vision and it gives me a headache.

Things like the modern Link's Awakening would have me projectile vomiting if I tried to play it.

There should never be blur, ever.

Depth of Field being visible is an artifact of 2D screens & prints. Our eyes do have depth of field, but when we look straight at something they very quickly refocus onto that thing, so it's often very hard to perceive. With a static photograph or picture on a screen we can't refocus on what we're looking at within the picture automatically.

It's not that our eyes don't have depth of field, it's that they operate differently than fixed photos or pre-set DoF effects in a game.

Blur is completely natural to human vision, to any kind of vision. Look far away while bringing your hand close. Blur. Now look at your hand. Everything else goes blurry. You can even unfocus your eyes while looking at something. Now everything's blurry.

Damon Albarn would disagree.

Tatatata tatá feel good

This is unnecessarily snarky. I would hate to use one of these depth-of-field screenshots for, say, an attachment to a bug report.

But it looks like a great visual effect to use on a marketing site, especially to highlight a specific part of a screenshot to get across whatever you want to emphasize.

> This is unnecessarily snarky.

You think? I thought it was just a funny quip.

> This is unnecessarily snarky.

It's a joke, chill

Yes, let's blur the screenshot first and then use a hidpi display to unblur it /s

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