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HDR on the iPhone (Revised)
Today I’ve got the opportunity to test the new features on the iPhone 4 I talked about a while back. That feature is the ability to take pictures in “HDR”. As I explained in my old post it takes three different images at various exposures and combines them with a basic tonemapping algorithm which leaves us with a tonemapped HDR image.
That means that we can see more exposure range in our pictures. I was a bit skeptical about this feature so I decided to test it a little bit to see the results I got.
First Test:
This is the first test. The setting is simple. We see that we have two very different exposure zones in the shot. The left part of the image is in shade and the right part is a sunny landscape. These images show the results direct from the iPhone. We pulled the focus on the shaded part, that’s why the image is so bright in the sunny part. The right image is the HDR image pulled from the iPhone. As we can see, we get some more detail of the sunny landscape compared to the normal foto.
It’s not a great result still… Even-though the right image is less blown out compared to the left one it still is.
Second Test:
This test is based on the same setting as the first test but a much different result is obtained. We made the camera focus on the landscape instead of pulling focus on the shaded foreground. The result is that the HDR shot is a little better but not much. The shaded part is still really dark even after the tonemapping.
Third Test:
This test is the one we need to focus on. This is a typical case scenario where we want to use HDR tonemapping techniques to get a good shot. We have a subject (me in this case) in the foreground, a first background that is shaded and a second background which is sunny. As we see, the HDR that the iPhone creates is much richer in color and exposure information. We can see all the detail of the sunny background that was blown out in the normal picture.
So to re-cap. The HDR option will help you in some cases but don’t expect it to work in all cases because with auto-white balance you can not choose the exposure of your shot and also in the iPhone you can’t choose the exposure bracketing options that in HDR imaging help you get the perfect lighting. Also you can’t play with the options of the HDR once you take it because it saves it in JPEG, loosing all the power of real HDR imaging…
It’s a cool feature to play around with and you can get some great results cosidering its a camera on a phone but if you really want to experiment with HDR imaging you’ll still need a better camera with more manual configuration.
If you want to check out some of my HDR work head on to my Behance Portfolios by clicking in any one of them.
See you soon!
