HDR Camera

The camera on my Droid X is pretty good: it's an impressive 8 megapixels (which seems better than, for instance, the iPhone's 5MP, until you come to understand the Myth of Megapixels), but more than that, the pictures turn out quite nice. They're sharp, with good color, etc. More than acceptable for a phone camera.

But recently the camera stopped working. Actually, the default camera app stopped working. Retro Camera still worked. So while I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I downloaded HDR Camera, a free (but ad-supported) replacement for the standard camera app. It doesn't apply funky filters like Retro Camera and its ilk. However, it does do HDR (high dynamic range) photography. I've been interested in HDR ever since I discovered what it was and saw the pictures.

Basically, HDR takes three or more shots of the same scene at different exposures, and uses the best bits of each. So rather than having a well-exposed Elizabeth against a bleach-white sky and next to a dark blot of tree-shadow, the sky is dark blue, Elizabeth is still well-exposed, and the dark blot is revealed to be rich green grass under the tree. Nothing is burnt-out, nothing is under-exposed.

HDR in the hands of a really good photographer, with professional grade hard- and software, produces some pretty startling effects:


So I tried HDR Camera for the first time today and it works very, very well. With "real" HDR, the camera needs to be on a tripod so all three or four pictures line up exactly, and can be blended together. Somehow, HDR Camera gets around this. It takes four pictures and somehow calculates better exposure ranges for different parts of the pictures.

I've only used it twice, but it worked well both times, even though my handheld phone/cam was moving around quite a bit. Obviously, it's not going to deliver the goods like professional equipment and software would, but it's exciting that it can provide any HDR effect at all.

The first picture, below, is with the regular camera app, the second is with HDR Camera:

I was excited enough about the results to buy the "pro" (i.e., ad-free) app for $0.99 on the very first day I used this app. It's only the second Android app I've ever paid for.