HDR photography – High Dynamic Range photography – is all the rage lately. To explain this basically, camera sensors have a limited dynamic range when it comes to capturing scenes with part dark and part bright areas. It ends up using the exposure for either bright or dark area and throwing the other end to the extreme creating unpleasant results.
HDR photography is a technique of combining multiple images with different exposures and creating a picture that is properly exposed in all the areas.
iPhone photography aka iPhoneography is very popular now so much so that iPhone is one of the most popular cameras in Flickr. Plus, there are so many choices when it comes to iPhone photography apps.
With Pro HDR iPhone app from eyeApps, you can also take HDR photographs with your iPhone. The $1.99 app is easy to use.
With Auto HDR, you just point at the scene and the app determines the bright and dark areas and takes 2 consecutive pictures and combines and creates a HDR image. You just need to hold your iPhone really steady.
With Manual HDR, you get to tap and select the areas you want to expose for. As shown in the pictures below, you tap the area where it is bright and dark and it will then combine the 2 photos to create a well balanced image.
With the final image, you can still adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Warmth and Tint to suit your liking. Adjusting the sliders lets you see the updates live in the image. You can then save the created image to your library or email it.
There is a 3rd mode called Library HDR. If you have another Camera iPhone app that you like. You can take multiple exposure shots and store it to your library. Then you can open up Pro HDR app and just pick the images from your library to create a HDR image.
I found the best results happen when you hold your iPhone super-steady or even try to rest it on something solid. If you are trying to do this after 3 cups of coffee, good luck! But, the app does a great job of aligning images to provide natural looking images.
The app won’t win awards for the UI like the Camera+ iPhone app but it does it’s job very well. It hasn’t yet been updated to support iOS 4 or for Retina Display yet and that’s the reason I took off 1 star in the rating.
Here is a another example of what I tried outdoors after sunset.
For $1.99, Pro HDR app provides very good results and makes taking pictures with the iPhone a lot more fun. There are some excellent HDR samples in this gallery.
There are a few more apps that cane create iPhone HDR images and we will be looking at other options in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Gallery (click on thumbnail to see full size image)
If you use an app you like to share with us, comment here or tweet us @TopiPhone or leave a comment in the TiR Facebook page.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Availability: App Store
Pricing: $1.99
Reviewed at version: 1.1
