Saturday, August 7, 2010

Android Mobile HDR? You got it.

Created with PicSay Pro on my Cliq. Single frame HDR image.

If you're not familiar with HDR it stands for High Dynamic Range. It's typically the process of using several exposures of the same scene and combining them to bring out the shadows and highlights to mimic the wide gamut of light that our eyes can see that the camera can not.
This is my first attempt at the process on my Android phone.
I used the photo editing app PicSayPro to make two different exposures of the same frame, one with the clouds clear and correctly exposed and the other with the mountains and foreground correctly exposed. I opened the first image (The foreground and mountatins) in PicSay Pro then tapped "Effects" then "Insert Picture".
I browsed for the second photo, selected it, and chose the entire photo for the crop.
You then have the option to erase portions of the photo. I used a soft brush to erase the mountains and foreground revealing the correctly exposed portions. Voila! Mobile HDR.
You could make as many layers as you wanted and get very detailed but there are limits in PicSayPro, especially in the output size of the image. All images are output at smaller than 1000 pixels on the longest side. That really limits the usability of the process for printing. The other limitation is the size of the screen vs. the size of my chubby fingers for erasing the top "mask" photo.
But it was a fun exercise and pretty cool result considering it was done on a cell phone while in line at In-N-Out.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, HDR Camera+ (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.almalence.hdr_plus) does all that automatically - takes exposure bracketed images, fuses them in to an HDR image and does tone mapping.

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