How To Take and Create HDR Photos on Android

HDR photography is all the rage these days, isn't it? A good HDR shot can bring out details in shadows, while not over-exposing lighter elements. This technique has the potential to give your shots a really great hyper-realistic effect. Apple announced in their recent event that the camera software on their i-devices would be getting built-in HDR shooting modes.  

Apple is using auto-bracketing in the app to take three different exposures, then they are combined in-app. On the Android platform, there is no integrated solution for doing this. There are only a few apps that can simulate an HDR effect with density and tone mapping. Continue on to see how well these apps perform. 
 

Post-processing images

There are a few apps that can be used to post-process the regular images you take into simulated HDR shots. To test this, we used an app called Photo Enhance Pro. This offers you the ability to apply a simulated HDR effect to any image on the SD card. The interface is simple, just select an image and the filter will be applied. In the menu, you can choose how aggressive you want the color correction to be.  

When viewing the resulting image, tapping and holing the screen will display the unaltered picture. This is a nice way to see just what you're getting. We found the HDR processing in this app to be a little on the weak side. Even on the maximum setting, it didn't change as much as we'd have expected. It's mostly just bumping up the shadows. 

Check out the images below for examples of what we were able to get from this app. Each images has the original below the processed shot. Some shots were okay, but most of them just end up muddy looking. 


The full version of this app is expensive at £2.99. The free version won't allow you to export the full resolution version of your processed images. There are probably better ways to generate HDR-like images. 

In-camera processing

An app we have previously mentioned, Camera 360 Pro is also capable of processing a shot into an HDR image of sorts. The nice thing about going this route, is that you can see the processed image in the camera app, not in a separate processing app. To select HDR effects, just tap the effect button at the top of the window. Scroll down and pick either HDR Simulation light, or heavy. 

All you have to do is snap the photo and Camera 360 will process it on the spot. In general, the pictures looked fairly good. Unlike the above processing only app, Camera 360 was able to crank up the shadow colors to a degree, and kept the detail in the light areas. It still doesn't look as good as a real HDR shot might, but it's certainly passable.   
 
Some shots were just too dark to really get a good effect in the shaded areas. In some darker spots there is noticeable pixelation. Considering this is a simulated effect, it looks better than we had expected. Check out the gallery below to see the shots we got with this app. Some will be paired with similar shots from the regular camera below.       

Camera 360 will run you  $3.99 in the Market. This is probably a more worthwhile investment, as it is a very good camera app with lots of effects and options.

The hard way

If these simulations aren't your thing, you might be able to cobble together some HDR shots with the use of a tripod of some sort. You'll have to take at least two images at different exposures. The location of the exposure controls will vary from one phone to the next, but in stock Android it is in the main settings popup in the camera app. This control is part of a longer scrolling list, so getting the exposures done is going to be difficult. Android doesn't have any auto-bracketing to take multiple exposures in short order, and were not aware of an apps that do it either.   
 
If you can immobilize the phone, you could manage to get the different exposures. One problem is that many camera phones tend to oversaturate the high exposures. This can lead to artifacting when you do merge the images.Try taking images at +2, 0, and -2 first. If the result doesn't look right, try going with +1, 0, and -1. 

Unless you have very steady hands, it's going to be hard to do this without some sort of mechanism to brace the phone. If the shots don't match up very closely, your resulting image will be blurry. Check out this explanation of just how HDR works in Photoshop and give it a shot. 

There is not integrated solution to make real HDR images on Android at this time. But give the community a few weeks now that Apple has the feature, and there might be some interesting apps. For the time being, Camera 360 is a great option for most casual users. The more adventurous out there may choose to take multiple shot and merge them into HDR images later. If you give any of this a shot, let us know how is goes.