Thursday, August 19, 2010

Advanced High Dynamic Range Photography for iPhone

Pictional has announced the release of TrueHDR 1.1, an update to TrueHDR that brings major improvements in high dynamic range (HDR) photography to the iPhone. With the new release, users can easily create full-resolution HDR images on both the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS. Users can also easily share their HDR photos via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

TrueHDR is designed to address the issue that cameras can only capture a limited range of brightness in a single photo. In other words, when people take photos of a scene that has a large range from bright to dark, they often have to choose between the bright areas and the dark areas - if a picture is appropriately exposed for the bright areas (e.g., a sunny sky with clouds), then the dark areas (e.g., a person standing in the shade under a tree) often become gray or black blobs with no details. Vice versa, if a picture is correctly exposed for the dark areas, the bright areas get washed out and look like white haze.

TrueHDR allows users to take two photos on an iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS with the in-app camera, tapping on a bright area to adjust exposure for the first image and tapping on a dark area to adjust exposure for the second image. TrueHDR uses sophisticated computational techniques to automatically align and merge the original images, and then optimize the resulting image for display. It also allows users to select a pair of saved images previously taken under different exposure settings, and merge them into one HDR image.

TrueHDR employs state-of-the-art image merging algorithms that draw inspiration from human visual perception, producing images that show high dynamic range yet are natural-looking. As a result, TrueHDR results are often much closer to what users' eyes originally saw, and rarely suffer from banding (a.k.a. "halo") artifacts that have come to be associated with HDR pictures.

In the new release of TrueHDR, new memory management techniques now allow for beautiful HDR results at the full (native) resolutions of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS cameras. The algorithm for aligning images has also been improved to better handle hand movement during the course of a user taking multiple photos, leading to even higher quality results and greater ease of use.

The new release of TrueHDR also includes an improved user interface, an option for auto-saving original pre-HDR photos, support for quick app switching which allows user to pick up right from where they left off when returning to TrueHDR, and support for creating HDR images with the iPhone 4's front camera.

Feature highlights:
* Now supports full resolution, including iPhone 4 camera (front and back)
* Improved user interface, including support for iPhone 4 retina display
* New sharing features (Facebook, Twitter, email)
* Better image alignment, and more natural-looking results
* Auto-saving option for original pre-HDR photos
* Supports quick app switching - pick up from where you left off when you return

Supported Languages:
* US English and Chinese

Pricing and Availability:
TrueHDR 1.1 is $1.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photography category.




*thanks iclarified*

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

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