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iPhone iOS 4.1 — how HDR photography works
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The coolest new feature coming to iPhones with iOS 4.1, due to land this week, is HDR photography. It’ll take your iPhone 4 snaps and supercharge them with bags more detail, and here’s how…

High dynamic range — photo wizardry
HDR photography is not a new term. It’s a popular, if contentious, subject among photo enthusiasts. Although it’s not something you’ll find built-in to your average SLR camera, or high-end smartphone. The photo geek contention arises because an HDR photo isn’t a single photo in the purest sense. It’s a composite of several snaps.

HDR nuts, and there are lots of them around, normally have to splice together the photos that make up an HDR image manually (well, ish), mounting the camera on top of a tripod to get the three shots traditionally used in an HDR composition.

Photo editing packages like Photoshop can do the complicated part of actually melding the images, but we’ll doff our caps to Apple for making it even easier with iOS 4.1. You’ll just have to take the photo as normal and your iPhone will do the rest.

The trinity of HDR
Using the iOS 4.1 HDR function, your iPhone takes three snaps in quick succession. The idea is that the scene captured should be exactly the same in each — so keep those hands still — but the exposure settings are different.

One photo will be normal, using a standard setting that’ll give you an “ordinary looking” photo. The second is under exposed, so will look dark, to capture detail in very bright parts of an image that might otherwise be bled out thank to high ambient light levels. Clouds, perhaps.

The final image is over-exposed, making lighter areas look as if they’ve been blasted by a searchlight. In this photo, darker areas will be revealed in more detail as the sensor lets in more light than normal, allowing it to poke into these dark bits.

The HDR process involves taking all the best bits from each photo — the extra detail that the darker and lighter photos provide — and then incorporating them into the “standard” photo, which provides the base for your HDR artwork.

The magic of HDR
At the time of writing, iOS 4.1 hasn’t yet been released, so we don’t know quite how much control we’ll have over HDR settings, but the results can be hugely impressive — even a little bit magical, as we’ve heard Steve Jobs say about Apple’s products a handful of times before.

A good HDR photo makes your scene seem a little larger than life, with an alarming level of detail in all part of the image that seems like it holds more insights into a scene than your eye would normally perceive. When manually making an HDR image, you can make a photo look genuinely unreal too.

Clouds in particular can be made to look as if they’ve been pulled-in from a fantasy world when snapped using HDR — a moody-looking rain cloud will benefit from both the under- and over-exposed images. Check out these pair of HDR images for instance…

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