Jun
27
2011
The iPhone provides a good solid camera facility, by camera phonestanard, and although it’s great to have a good camera in your phone at all times, the quality of photograph is always going to be inferior compared to high-end dedicated digital cameras. There are however a few tricks that you can try to really bring out the best from your iPhones Camera.
First lets look at the Built in Camera App that comes as standard with the iPhone.
The Built it iPhone Camera App is pretty basic but it can produce really good results, firstly you don’t have to rely on the software’s auto focus, which tends to focus on foreground objects, you can touch the screen to focus on a specific point or object, this allows you to capture detail on distant objects. You can also take HDR photos with the iPhone.
What is HDR on the iPhone?
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range imaging and is a technique which adds more detail to photographs, especially in low or high lighted 
areas of the picture. On the iPhone the technique is implemented by 3 photographs being taken at the same time, one picture is under exposed, on picture is over exposed and one picture is as normal. The 3 photographs are then merged together to show the most detail possible.
In the 2 pictures below the HDR image appears to be brighter than the non HDR image, and more detail can be seen in the clouds and brick work.
Non HDR Image (Click to enlarge)
- HDR Photo (Click to Enlarge)
HDR imaging works well for some but not all shots, fast action shots generally don’t work well with HDR, also be aware that you can’t use the flash on the iPhone whilst taking HDR images. To turn HDR imaging on when using the iPhones Camera App you can select it on the top centre of the ViewFinder screen whilst taking a photo.
You can capture very impressive photographs with the iPhone’s default Camera App, but it does lack a number of key features and many iPhone users install the Camera+ app instead.
Camera+ is available for purchase in the Apple App Store and adds a great deal of functionality when taking a photo, for example you can set a different exposure point to focus point. On the default Camera App the Exposure point is set to the focus point but when taking a photo with Camera+ you can press the screen to set a focus point and then drag with a second finger to set the exposure point, this allows you to take more control over the photo, as seen in the 2 shots below. Although both shots are taken in almost an identical position, I’ve set 2 different exposure points allowing for 2 different photographs.
Camera+ Picture
Camera+ Picture with different exposure point
In addition to manual exposure points Camera+ includes a virtual light box mode and full picture editing suite, tools which were originally missing from the original default Camera App. As well as imaging editing its possible to apply filters, alter colours and apply image frames.
The following image was originally captured with the default iPhone app and then edited with Camera+ where a clarity filter was added to make the main focus of the image brighter
Original Image (Click to Enlarge)
With clarity Filter Added (Click to Enlarge)
The iPhone is a very convienient and powerful photography tool which can capture fantastic images.
By admin •
Featured Articles, How to Articles, Image, Software •
• Tags: iPhone, Media, Photo, picture
