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Can you really do HDR on the iPhone? Pro HDR mini review Part 1

Feb 28

PhilPhotography, iPhone HDR, iPhone, iphoneography, Photography, Reviews 1 Comment

Can you really do HDR on the iPhone? I take a look at the Pro HDR app and provide some examples of what it can do, so you can see for yourself before buying. Short version: I like it! Read on to see why.

A few days ago I saw a Tweet linking to a photo and it included a ProHDR hashtag. I viewed the photo and thought it looked good, but my interest was piqued by exploring the hashtag further on Twitter.  The results that some people had achieved were quite impressive.  So I thought I would have a go at creating an HDR type photo on the iPhone myself.  I enjoyed the process so much and was impressed enough with the results that I was inspired to blog it and share the results here with you, dear reader.

The Pro HDR app has been developed by eyeAppsLLC.  Their site has some good comparison shots but there is nothing like trying it yourself and seeing what the ‘realworld’ results are like.  So I have a few examples to show you.  That is going to be in Part 2 of this mini-review, published in a few days, but before that let’s have a look at the user interface and what the Pro HDR app is like to use.

The first thing you see when starting the app is the screen below, giving you the choice of working with existing images or using the iPhone’s camera to capture your images:

Both approaches work nicely and intuitively.  Selecting Camera HDR will start up the iPhone camera and you will see the screens below, asking you to take two pictures (the app, like much HDR software, limits HDR processing to two photos) one exposed for the highlights, and one for the shadows.

If you have the photos already on your iPhone, clicking on the ‘Library HDR’ on the home screen accesses your photo library as normal and you can pick from any image in your library or on your Camera Roll.

Processing the HDR

Once you have your two images you will move onto the next stage where the software trys to align them and then does an initial blend.  From this basic starting point you then have quite a lot of control (for an iPhone) over the resulting image via the Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Warmth sliders, as shown in the screenshot below:

If you look closely you can see the blue double arrow in the bottom right corner of the image, this will give you a bigger version of the image so that you can see better how the result will look.  You have to return to the screen shown above to make further adjustments, but the larger view is very useful to see more detail.

Clicking Save will save out a full size version of the newly created HDR if you want to, but the Settings allow you to change the size of both the final output and the e-mailed versions.  I like the way this adjustment screen works.  It might not be detailed enough for some, but I take the view that this is an iPhone app and not a replacement for the desktop HDR software that you would use for serious HDR work.  What I like about this screen is that it is fairly simple, but also just enough to give you some half-decent control over the final image.

As with all HDR processing, you need to be careful about using massively different variations of light and dark shots, or you will get the ‘blooming’ effect on the borders of light/dark areas.

I am really impressed with the results this app can give you, as I said before, so how does it look in reality?

Well I will cover that in Part 2 of this mini-review, so please, check back in a couple of days, Tuesday to be precise, and I will post some examples of my preliminary tests with the Pro HDR app, so subscribe via the link at the bottom right of this page (edit: or on the dropdown menu top right on mobile version), or follow me on Twitter, to be notified as soon as I post Part 2, and thank you for reading this far.

In the meantime, if you have an iPhone and are interested in trying the Pro HDR app, go and get it.  Honestly for just £1.19 ($1.99) it is a bargain and is certainly a vast improvement over the free ‘HDR’ type of apps I have tried.