iPhone 4 HDR Photography Tips
Posted 09/09/2010 at 5:20pm
| by Roberto Baldwin
Now that the iPhone 4 is capable of HDR photographs while on the go, here are a few tips to help you get the most of the feature.
Turn on HDR

Launch the Camera app in the middle you'll see HDR off. Just tap that for HDR action.
No Flash
Flash does not work with the HDR setting. Go ahead, try turning it on, we'll wait. See what we mean.
Save a regular photo

When you take your first HDR photo, you'll notice the above dialog box. We recommend you dismiss it. HDR is great when the conditions are right, but sometimes the regular photo is actually better than the HDR. It's good to have the option to choose between the two.

If you changed the settings, you can resume keeping a "normal" copy of the photo by navigating to Settings>Photos. Turn on Keep Normal Photo.
Which photo's which?

While navigating through your photos on the iPhone, HDR photos will be given a special little tag in the upper right corner. The HDR tag appears when you you have Photos navigation on the screen. Just tap on your photo to bring up these controls.
Unfortunately, once you've imported these photos into iPhoto, there's no easy way to see which photo is which. If you select a photo and navigate to the menu bar Photos>Show Extended Photo Info, you'll notice that the HDR photo is usually about .5MB larger than the regular photo. Not exactly an easy task. Hopefully we'll have an iPhoto update that'll fix this.
Don't move.
No really. The way the iPhone creates HDR images is by take three photos with different exposures. We'll just call them dark, medium and light. It then crams these pictures together and pulls out the best exposed bits for the final picture.
The only issue with this is that those three images, if they contain rapid movement you end up with odd "missing" items.

For example, We had Flo clap her hands. In the HDR photo, her hands and part of her arms seemed to have disappeared.
Have Fun Experimenting

The iPhone 4's HDR feature is really spectacular. It's already made our iPhone pics better and we can't wait to try it out in the snow where exposure is notoriously difficult for the iPhone.

That said, HDR won't fix all of your photos. Some photos are just beyond help. But we encourage you to experiment, especially with the movement/disappearing issue. You can join our Flickr set of crazy and beautiful HDR photos and we'll post our favorites on the site.
Have Fun!
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