The new slider on the left side of the editing screen allows for manual adjustment of the level of background blur.

One of the most talked about new features of the HTC's latest flagship smartphone, the One M8, is the Duo Camera. Using the primary camera and a second sensor to create a shallow depth-of-field effect, the Duo Cam produced less-than-perfect results in our testing. Thanks to an update to the Gallery app, the intensity of the effect can now be adjusted.  

The M8 records image information on a 1/3-inch 4MP CMOS sensor but also comes with a secondary chip to capture depth information. This is meant to mimic the stereoscopic view of human eyes and allows the camera to distinguish between objects in the foreground and background of an image. The One M8's UFocus feature uses this information to apply blur to the background in an attempt to simulate the narrow depth-of-field of large sensor/fast lens combinations on digital SLRs and mirrorless system cameras. 

However, in our review of the One M8 we were not too impressed with the performance of Duo Cam and UFocus. The feature struggled to separate the subject from the background in a precise way and the backround blur went from 0 to 100 without any intermediate steps, giving the UFocus images a fake look. 

So it's good news that HTC has now published an update to its Gallery app that comes with an improved UFocus feature. You can now adjust the amount of blur that is being applied to the background via a slider on the left side of the screen. We've tried the new version of UFocus and while the ability to reduce the amount of blur helps the images it produces look a little more realistic, the feature's main problem remains: the foreground/background separation is simply not precise enough. Check our samples below and if you think the results are worth the upgrade, download it from the Google Play Store.

Original image
100% blur
50% blur
15% blur

Via: Android Central