HDR

HDR, or high dynamic range, can add clarity and depth to your iPhone photos. The iPhone's native camera app has an HDR option (see Sharon's post about it and HDR photography), and it does an admirable job of filling in the highs and lows of a photo. I found that I was able to achieve even better results with TrueHDR, a $1.99 app.

When you launch TrueHDR, you're given four options for creating an HDR image: Auto Capture, Semi-Auto Capture, Manual Capture, and Choose Pictures.

With Auto Capture, you simply tap the camera button and hold … Read more

The iPhone 4S' camera does an admirable job in a variety of lighting conditions, particularly when you remember that the device is a phone first, and a camera second. Still, if you find yourself shooting in low-light situations, you probably have noticed that your photos look blurry or grainy. Cortex Camera is a $2.99 app that can reduce this graininess or noise when shooting in low light. Here's how it works:

Instead of taking a single, still photo, Cortex Camera actually captures a short video when you hit the shutter button. Thus, you will need to hold your … Read more

Set to debut around late May in Japan, Sony's first waterproof Handycam packs a cavalcade of features that would make nearly any similarly sized shooter blush in comparison.

Despite the small stature, the HDR-GW77V can go up to 16 feet under water (for up to an hour), survive a near 5-foot drop, and resist dust.

As for imaging specifics, the engineers at Sony packed a lot into a very little device, with buzz-worthy features such as 20.4-megapixel resolution, full 1080p (60fps) video capture up to 28Mbps, and 10x optical zoom. Other notable features in the tiny shooter (1.2-inch width and 4.15-inch height) include a pop-out 3-inch touch screen, 16GB internal storage (with option to expand via SDHC or Memory Stick Micro), panoramic photos, and a built-in GPS chip for geotagging photos. … Read more

Even the uninitiated can identify HDR photos--their striking appearance often pops with high contrast, saturated colors, and an unmistakable surreal look. These photos seem like a lot of work, but when you examine the process of creating HDR photos, you'll find that it's much easier than it looks.

HDR, or "high dynamic range," photography is simple: a photo is shot three times, at three different exposures--low, regular, and high--and then stacked to create one image. In doing so, you create a sharp image that looks closer to what the human eye sees, as the varying highlights … Read more

Adobe has spruced up Photoshop CS6's tool for creating HDR images--at the same time that it's updated editing tools with features that make high-dynamic range photos less interesting to me.

HDR images combine multiple shots taken over a range of bright to dark exposures. That means that the shadow detail can be taken from the bright images and the highlight detail from the dark images.

Used in a tame way, an HDR image shows more of the full range of tones the human eye can see. But plenty of people prefer the more unusual or even outrageous effects … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--High dynamic range (HDR) photography has largely been the province of photo enthusiasts willing to put up with its hassles, but Dolby Laboratories hopes to bring it to the masses with a semi-proprietary technology called JPEG-HDR.

HDR photography began as a way to compensate for cameras' shortcomings compared to the human eye. The biological image sensor can capture a much greater range of dark and bright tones, whereas cameras typically can capture only one, the other, or something in the middle.

That means problems with photos in areas with a wide range of lighting- a scene where someone is … Read more

Prepare to see another giant leap in smartphone picture-taking quality this year.

Sony announced today three new back-illuminated stacked CMOS image sensors optimized for bright and low-light conditions. The new compact sensors are faster, consume less power than previous versions, and will be available in 8- to 13- megapixel flavors. Most notably, the sensors feature new "RGBW Coding" and "High Dynamic Range (HDR) Movie" abilities baked directly onto the hardware. The iPhone 4S features a Sony 8-megapixel sensor, and it's possible that this may be a preview of the camera sensor inside the iPhone 5.

You might recognize the RGB acronym, as it stands for red-green-blue; the new sensor adds white pixels to the mix that pumps up the sensor's light sensitivity. It is possible that a future smartphone with this sensor will have little problem shooting pictures in dark rooms (or at night), as evidenced in the example picture above. Another benefit to the RGBW coding is that no changes to signal processing are required to support this updated technology, making it easy to implement. Surprisingly, Kodak has been shopping around something like this technology since at least 2007. … Read more

As its name suggests, Camera360 is an all-around, effects-heavy camera app for your Android mobile device. Depending on how complicated you want to get, it could serve as a power-packed replacement for your device's stock camera app.

Camera360 rolls the functionality of several different camera apps into one. It lets you wrap frames or scenery around your photos, or add whimsical effects like Ghost, Infrared Thermal, or a Warhol-like Four-Color Poster. And, of course, there's also a long menu of filters to choose from, including two different HDR filters, Black & White, Retro, and Lomo styles among many … Read more

A videographer who's brought the distinctive look of high dynamic range (HDR) photography to video has released an iPhone app that tackles the technology.

Flare debuted today for $1.99 on the Apple App Store. It uses an image-processing algorithm to try to perform HDR duties such as bringing out details otherwise lost in the murk of shadowy areas. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't match up to the HDR video that developer Alaric Cole produced with two Canon 5D Mark II SLR cameras and a beam splitter as part of Soviet Montage Productions. It is, after all, just a single lowly mobile phone image sensor.

"The algorithm is an adaptation of what I wrote for the original Soviet Montage clip," Cole said. "I'm definitely not claiming this is anything like what we did with two 5D's, but I have spent over 1700 hours on this project, so it is doing something ;)"

The app comes with an slider to adjust the strength of the effect. For a gander at what it does on its default settings, check out this video of Flare for the iPhone my colleague Josh Lowensohn shot this morning on his iPhone 4 in the glamorous CNET offices. (Guess who has the Andy Warhol-Marilyn Monroe print?) To see it at a punchier maxed-out setting, here's another video. (Guess who has the space invaders on the office door?) … Read more