TrueHDR: A Nifty Photo App for the iPhone 3GS

At the suggestion of my friend Automatt, I’ve spent the last few days playing around with the TrueHDR, a $1.99 HDR photography app for the iPhone 3GS. You can see some of the results in the images above.

To be clear: I’m not usually a fan of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. As a general rule, I find that it is rampantly overused and often *cough cough* kind of gimmicky. Indeed, the incidence of HDR abuse is so high that I’ve been known to grumble that the technology should perhaps require a government-issued license to use.

But in the case of the iPhone, which offers few adjustments to the camera’s basic settings, a tool like TrueHDR offers a simple way to compensate for some of those limitations. To see what I mean, let’s try a side-by-side comparison of the same scene. The top image here was taken with the regular iPhone 3GS camera, while the bottom image used TrueHDR:

My bottom line: TrueHDR generates a relatively subtle HDR effect, it’s extremely easy to use, and (most of all) I really like some of the photos I’ve taken with it.

photos by Todd Lappin / Telstar Logistics