Trying out the new HDR photo feature on the iPhone 4

As you may or may not know, Apple released iOS 4.1 last month. One of the new features added to the iPhone 4 was High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos. The basic rundown (as I understand it) of what happens is that the iPhone will take a picture 3 different ways in rapid succession, adjusting the exposure automatically for you. Then it tries to figure out which parts of the photos are the best from the 3 shots and then blends the best parts together into a single photo to give you an optimized shot. I’ve heard of this feature on high end DSLR cameras, but never on a mobile phone. I decided to try this out for myself to see how it looks.

Below you’ll see two photos, the left is the original shot and the one on the right is the HDR version. I took this photo outside my house during sundown.

You can see a huge difference between the photos. The sky is all washed out in the original photo. That’s just something you would have to deal with when taking pictures into the sun. Enter the HDR photo. The sky is fixed and looks blue like it’s supposed to be.

I’d have to say that this is a kick butt feature that I’m glad they added.  This is one feature that I’ll definitely be using in the future.