Simplest way to take HDR shots – The Android Way

For those who haven’t yet played with HDR (a.k.a High Dynamic Range) photography, let me put a quick brief. This is a photography mechanism of capturing the higher contrast image by preserving the greater amount of dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of the image.

With a DSLR you can take or rather I should say make HDR images. The technique is simple though cumbersome. Here you have to take multiple snaps of the same object with different exposure settings, called bracketing. And then using a photo manipulator you have to merge/stack all the images together to capture the lightest and brightest details from all the pictures and then generate an HDR image which has it all.

But, here I am not going to teach you how to do that. This is because, first I am not yet a photography expert (just a wannabe …. Still L ) and second, no one will bother to do all that if he/she is not into serious photography.

So I am going to talk about something simple and something which can do all this activity in seconds. All you need is a good android phone. For other phones also, I am sure if you are desperate enough, you should be able to find something like this. Now let’s see what I did.

What are we going to achieve?

Something Like this: Its my yesterday’s cup of coffee, which never looked this great. Even in reality 😉

And here is a 100% crop of the same image

Now believe me or not, it has been taken using an INR-15k phone. And below are the three images which yield this HDR image of my yesterday’s coffee

The images were taken at 5MP with 3 stop bracketing, everything automatically done by an app called HDR Camera+, you can find and purchase it for around INR-200/- at android matket. And once installed, all you have to do is to run the app, play a bit with its settings and tap. The phone I used for this is my SE Xperia Pro with android 2.3.3

Below are few more images which I tried yesterday.

Sample 1