Welcome to Phoneye.
Hi and welcome to the first Phoneye blog post. If you have read the home page you will gather what this blog is all about. Hopefully it will through time answer some of the questions that people have regarding the growing area of phoneography.
I will try to keep it as light and non technical as possible, if anything for the sake of my own sanity. The daily upload in the gallery will be accompanied with an image title and a description of the apps used to create it, so you can jump off there and start trying out the app mentioned or continue to the blog. The blog post concerning the daily upload will be a little more detailed and describe the settings and any problems I encountered in creating the image. I welcome any questions and will try to answers them quickly. So lets get to it....... with a thorny topic..... HDR.
I will try to keep it as light and non technical as possible, if anything for the sake of my own sanity. The daily upload in the gallery will be accompanied with an image title and a description of the apps used to create it, so you can jump off there and start trying out the app mentioned or continue to the blog. The blog post concerning the daily upload will be a little more detailed and describe the settings and any problems I encountered in creating the image. I welcome any questions and will try to answers them quickly. So lets get to it....... with a thorny topic..... HDR.
HDR shot of Ruperts Gateway
Ruperts Gateway shot 3rd Feb 13
Some people love it and some hate it, but what is HDR? Ok, a bit of background info before I get onto my image details. HDR is an acronym for High Dynamic Range photography. Put in simple terms this means capturing an image with a full range of tones and contrast across the image. Its not a new science. Photographers have always combined images to get the full range in their images, this may have been in a darkroom or involved masking images of different exposures in the computer. Now the digital era has brought us software that can achieve it a lot quicker.
HDR enables you to capture a greater range between the lightest and darkest areas in an image than a normal shot, and can more accurately show the scene shot. If this is still bamboozling you. Very simply, if you have ever taken a photograph and the sky is washed out or the sky is nice but the foreground is dark, its because depending on your metering and where you focused the camera, it can't handle the difference in contrast range as in the image below.
HDR enables you to capture a greater range between the lightest and darkest areas in an image than a normal shot, and can more accurately show the scene shot. If this is still bamboozling you. Very simply, if you have ever taken a photograph and the sky is washed out or the sky is nice but the foreground is dark, its because depending on your metering and where you focused the camera, it can't handle the difference in contrast range as in the image below.
True HDR exponents will tell you correctly that you have to use a tripod. This is essential as HDR software combines multiple exposures of different values (usually a min of 3 exposures). After the number crunching the software gives you a tone mapped image that is a combination of your multiple exposures that you continue to edit till your heart is content. This is where the arguements for and against HDR come to the fore, as the editing and slider settings can take you from a hyper realistic image to an illustrative one with garish colours and glows around image subjects.
Thankfully as we are in the world of phoneography we don't have to worry too much about most of the above. Ideally you would still use something to keep the phone absolutely still, but really who carries a tripod around in their pocket. Although if you get hooked you may just end up with a mini one. FYI, all the shots on this post were done handheld. As long as you try to keep the phone as still as you can, you should get a reasonable result. Put the camera into HDR mode and shoot. The camera will do it all for you and then show you its interpretation of the scene in HDR.
The Nexus 4 as far as I can gather takes 3 shots but you don't hear 3 shutter sounds as it does so. This is probably part of the inbuilt camera app and other phones may differ but the idea remains the same, try and keep the phone as still as possible. If you move between shots the software may not manage to merge the exposures together cleanly and you will end up with ghosting. This is when you or something in the images moves and you end up with a faint ghost image in the final merged images. This is another reason that you don't see many HDR action shots as its not ideal for moving subjects.
Thankfully as we are in the world of phoneography we don't have to worry too much about most of the above. Ideally you would still use something to keep the phone absolutely still, but really who carries a tripod around in their pocket. Although if you get hooked you may just end up with a mini one. FYI, all the shots on this post were done handheld. As long as you try to keep the phone as still as you can, you should get a reasonable result. Put the camera into HDR mode and shoot. The camera will do it all for you and then show you its interpretation of the scene in HDR.
The Nexus 4 as far as I can gather takes 3 shots but you don't hear 3 shutter sounds as it does so. This is probably part of the inbuilt camera app and other phones may differ but the idea remains the same, try and keep the phone as still as possible. If you move between shots the software may not manage to merge the exposures together cleanly and you will end up with ghosting. This is when you or something in the images moves and you end up with a faint ghost image in the final merged images. This is another reason that you don't see many HDR action shots as its not ideal for moving subjects.
Now for me the HDR output is not the be all and end all. It is entirely up to your own taste and if you compare the original output with the non HDR shot you can't argue that it is an improvement and you may be happy to stop there.
I continued to edit mine or as they say, stylise. I feel that the Nexus 4 images, HDR or otherwise are a bit flat and lack some contrast. It is a camera phone afterall. So for this shot of Ruperts Gateway I used the Snapseed App to add some contrast. This App is available for iPhone and Android and is free to download. My settings for the final image were
I continued to edit mine or as they say, stylise. I feel that the Nexus 4 images, HDR or otherwise are a bit flat and lack some contrast. It is a camera phone afterall. So for this shot of Ruperts Gateway I used the Snapseed App to add some contrast. This App is available for iPhone and Android and is free to download. My settings for the final image were
- Saturation (minus) -7
- White Balance -2
- Ambiance +15
- Contrast points set to +40 on lower part of image
- Drama Filter #2 at +35
- Vignette filter
I'm happy with the results for a second attempt at phone HDR. On transfer to the big boy computer I found a fair amount of noise and artifacts in the image when zoomed into 100%. Its hard to see this on a small phone screen but it may be the software on the phone that caused this. I will continue to try it out along with other HDR Apps to find a solution to this but I don't plan to be printing out any large images so its not really an issue for me.
So that brings this post to an end. Hope you found it enjoyable and useful and if you have a camera phone....give it a go. Although not done using a camera phone, to get some inspiration and see some great and moody HDR shots by Andrew Steel jump over to
http://www.darkart.co/
See y'all next post.
So that brings this post to an end. Hope you found it enjoyable and useful and if you have a camera phone....give it a go. Although not done using a camera phone, to get some inspiration and see some great and moody HDR shots by Andrew Steel jump over to
http://www.darkart.co/
See y'all next post.