Posted 18 Oct 2014

Extracting the "bug-eye" image from a Lytro file

So I have the raw database from the Mac version of the Lytro software. Each “image” is a directory with dm.lfp, raw.lfp, stack.lfp, stacklq.lfp, and thumbnail.jpg

The first thing I did was write a script to make galleries from the albums because UUIDs are incredibly unhelpful.

Looking at the other files, you can use lfpsplitter to get the sections out of LFP files. (The format has been reversed, but I’m not writing any software yet.)

I looked over everything. stack.lfp contains some H264 images, but nothing terribly useful. (Nothing like the jpegs lfpsplitter was made for.) However, raw.lfp contains the raw pixel array from the CCD. And raw2tiff can read this. So you just run:

raw2tiff -w 3280 -l 3280 -d short raw_imageRef0.raw raw.tiff

And you get what I’m calling the “bug-eye” view. It’s still needs to be demosaiced  (the process of turning raw CCD pixels into RGB pixels) and the bugeye thing is a problem (microlens problems).

But this solves one of the problems: turning the raw file off the camera into a usable array of pixels. Too bad I don’t know how to get them off the camera or what to do with the pixels after I have them.