Washington, Sep 4 - A new software, designed by optical scientists, is likely to revolutionise photography by teaching the camera new tricks. Its performance will then be no longer limited by the software pre-installed by the manufacturer.

'The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source,' said computer science professor Marc Levoy of Stanford University.

Levoy's graduate student Andrew Adams, who helped design the prototype of the Stanford camera (dubbed Frankencamera), imagines a future where consumers download applications to their open-platform cameras the way Apple apps are downloaded to iPhones today.

When the camera's operating software is made available publicly, perhaps a year from now, users will be able to continuously improve it, along the open-source model of the Linux operating system for computers or the Mozilla Firefox web browser, says a Stanford release.

From there, the sky's the limit. Programmers will have the freedom to experiment with new ways of tuning the camera's response to light and motion, adding their own algorithms to process the raw images in innovative ways.