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 photoAbove: 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 usedAbove: 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.

AppStore Link: HDR Camera - Price £1.19 ($1.99)

AppStore Link: iFlashReady - Price £0.59 ($.99)