Create high dynamic range imaging on your iPhone
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 10:00AM | Glyn Evans Before a begin this review, I just want to update all those who regularly follow this blog, and may have noticed that I posted this article several days ago, and then with in minutes pulled it from the site. The reason for this was that I was not happy with the accuracy of the article following a comment from reader Brandon Lee. The main issue was that having tried HDR Camera with several photo's, I posted the article and review with the wrong type of photo, which in turn gave missleading results, but thanks to Brandon I now have a suitable photo to use for this review. Also between then and now, this app has received an update, although my final verdict on this app has remained unchanged.
Anyway apologies out of the way, it is time to get on with the post, so here it is.
High dynamic range imaging seems all the rage at the moment, and I have to say I am one of those who likes this effect, so when I saw HDR Camera in the App Store, I just had to go and grab a copy. Despite the one negative reviewer comment, and the 1 star rating, I went ahead and paid my money and duly downloaded and installed the app directly to my iPhone (no iTunes for this one).
So how does HDR Camera perform, and is it worth the money?
Launch HDR Camera and you are presented with a straight forward interface, with a photo frame in the top half of the frame, the name of the selected filter under the photo frame, and three large buttons under that, which are:
- Select filter - here you choose the 3 available effects, Bloom, HDR Classic, HDR Color+, HDR Night mode, More colors and More contrast
- Options - here you select the output size of you finished photo, 320, 640, 800, 1024 or 1600
- Apply filter - as the name suggest, touch this and your chosen filter and output size is applied to your selected photo.
Before you can apply any of the above options, you first need to load or take a photo to manipulate. This is straight forward as across the bottom of the screen is a camera icon, touch this to launch the camera app and take a photo, or touch on the option to import from albums.
For the purpose of this review, I loaded the following photo sent to me by reader Brandon Lee.
Above: Original photo by Brandon LeeHaving loaded the photo, selected the filter and output options it was time to hit the Apply filter and wait for the result to appear.
For the first test I selected Bloom, and got the following result.
Above: Bloom EffectThen HDR Classic....
Above: HDR Classic Effect....followed by HDR Color+
Above: HDR Color+ Effect....then More colors
Above: More colors....and then More contrast.
Above: More contrastAfter running these tests, I the loaded a night-time photo and applied the HDR Night mode filter, just to see how good or bad it was.
Above: Original photo
Above: HDR Night mode effectAs you can see there was a mixed bag of results, which are somewhat disappointing, falling well short of producing what I would consider to be good high dynamic range photo's. I tried this app out on several other photo's and for me the results were equally disappointing.
Following on from my first review (which I pulled from this site), Brandon also sent me his photo which he had also used iFlashReady on, and whilst iFlashReady is not billed as a HDR capable app, it clearly is. I tried iFlashReady out on a number of photo's including the night-time shot, and I was more than satisfied with the end results.
Above: iFlashReady used
Above: iFlashReady usedSo is this app worth having? In a nutshell NO. At a price of £1.19 ($1.99), I would recommend anyone reading this, give's HDR Camera a miss and goes and grabs an alternative app like iFlashReady, which is capable of producing HDR looking results.
HDR Camera, iFlashReady in iPhone App Review 
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Reader Comments (8)
Well, that review saved me a bit of money. Thanks
I wonder... since it appears neither HDR Camera nor iFlash Ready are doing true HDR... which is based vaguely on a bracketing of a series of images... how much of this pseudo-HDR effect could in fact be achieved by using PhotoFX or Photogene (or even the elusive Naked Touch... still trying to get some answers on that app !!) to their full advantage by tweaking the colours and channels etc... curious?!
Hi Glyn,
Since our correspondence, I've had the misfortune of being tempted to try HDR Camera out for myself, and have arrived at the same conclusions as you. It largely produces unpleasant results I would be ashamed to show anyone on my iPhone or Flickr account. Other apps like iFlashReady and PhotoFX are far more capable of taking a badly exposed photo (a fault of the iPhone's limited camera software) and giving it some points of interest.
TrevorML: I'm glad you asked that question. Naturally it's impossible for any iPhone app today to produce true HDR images, as those require a series of bracketed images as you have noted. The iPhone camera API does not allow apps or users to manually adjust the auto-exposure values, or any other values for that matter. The best we can have for the moment (perhaps iPhone OS 3.0 will hand over more control to apps) is apps that simulate the effect by recovering lost/hidden photographic data.
I initially thought that iFlashReady worked by simply boosting the brightness of photos, which is how we might normally approach the problem in Photoshop/Aperture/Lightroom, etc. but it's actually more advanced. Looking at the developer's website, I discovered that they produce a professional application, Essential HDR (www.imagingluminary.com), for Windows PCs. It seems that they've taken some of their technologies and applied it to iFlashReady, and probably decided that marketing it as a brightening app would be more commercially successful than proclaiming its HDR features. Rightly so, I think, as few mainstream iPhone users know or give a crap about HDR.
But iFlashReady does work as an HDR app in practice, and like I was saying, it goes beyond simple brightening. What seems to be happening is a localized contrast balancing that increases brightness in dark areas without touching already well-exposed spots. A dark object can be directly beside a bright one, and the effect does not bleed over. I think it's probably more than just tweaking shadows and highlights too (as can be done in PhotoFX; I've tried and the results are not comparable), as it seems to have many subtle steps and a gentle tonal curve. The result looks surprisingly natural, and you can see that above. The ones from HDR Camera certainly do not.
Another thing that impressed me greatly was that the makers of iFlashReady seemed to have tuned their results with the iPhone's camera in mind. Noise is effectively suppressed, or simply not exaggerated by their processing. HDR Camera's "Night Mode" produces horrendous blotches of color noise across the entire photo. A few other apps I've seen also seem to just port their image effects over from the desktop side of things with no regard for imaging characteristics of the iPhone's camera.
If I sound like I'm plugging the app because I know the guys who made it, well I don't. I just use it nearly every other day and enjoy it a great deal. But since I'm recommending, another app I use often and find sadly underpublicized is the superb "ColorTaste with TOY LENS" by Tandem Systems (who is really a rather friendly Japanese developer), which costs US$1.99. In my opinion, this app handily beats others like ToyCamera and Camerabag because of one feature: lens distortion modelling. It doesn't just alter colors and add a vignette (although it can do those too), its Toy Lens mode subtly distorts and blurs photos to look like they came from a tiny plastic lens, like what you'd find on a Diana (120 film) or Vistaquest VQ1005 (keychain digital) camera. Again, to tie it back to the earlier part of this comment, this sort of initiative in iPhone app development impresses me greatly. Rather than just doing a me-too image processor, these two companies have opened up new avenues of iPhone photography.
Whilst knowing it is currently impossible to achieve true HDR results on the iPhone I was drawn in by the apps title and the hope that such an effect could be achieved quickly and easily like effects produced by other apps. Sadly the app title is misleading and the results disappointing, but thanks to Brandon I have been introduced to a neat little app, iFlashReady, which I will hopefully review later this week. Whilst this app does not produce what would be considered to be HDR, it does greatly improve low light shots, or shots with large areas of under exposure. I have played with Photo fx, but HDR is not really achievable, and I have not yet tried getting this result with Photogene, but will look at it and report back, unless someone else has already tried it.
I haven't bought this app yet but it looks great thus far!
Has anyone tried TrueHDR app for iPhone yet? Any comments on that app? It takes 2 shots and merges them to create the HDR image.
Why would it be impossible to create real HDR images on an iPhone? I bought this app after looking at it's website and they use a trick I discovered previously - the iPhone does light metering from the area where you tap to focus. By focusing on areas with different lighting, you will in effect get several images with a different lighting range. Combining these images and normalizing the light will give you a HDR image, or at least, an image with a higher dynamic range compared with taking a single image.
I have an example on my flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/finurlig/4150232626/sizes/o/
I have reduced the size of the images, and the quality of the final product is not perfect, but the increase in dynamic range should be undoubtable.
I took the two images that were merged by focusing on the building and on the sun.
Sorry, my bad, i thought this was the TrueHDR review ;) I used TrueHDR which does create HDR-images. The above reviewed app does not.