Better HDR on the iPhone

The iPhone 4 has a camera app that will create HDR photos automatically for you when you snap a picture.  The iPhone's HDR feature takes two pictures at different exposures then combines them, often into a better picture than you can take with any single picture.  An HDR picture taken with the camera app will make both bright areas and dark areas of a photo stand out. However, you can create a much more artistic HDR photo if you simply move beyond the camera app to an app that is dedicated to taking HDR photos.

The pictures I took for this post were taken with Pro HDR for the iPhone.  Not only does this app give your photos a richer appearance it even gives you the ability to tweak brightness, saturation, warmth, tint, etc. It's definitely a great option if all you have is an iPhone 3G because you don't have HDR with the built-in camera app unless you have an iPhone 4.  It actually even works with the iPad.

There are many other HDR apps in the App Store that may also be worth using though Pro HDR is the only one I've used.  TrueHDR is another app that I've heard works well and the app store reviews seem to back that up.  If you want to step your HDR photography up to the next level, get one of these dedicated HDR apps.

If you want to know how to add an HDR-like effect to a single photo after the fact, check out my HDR After the Fact on iOS post.