Use TrueHDR to unleash the potential of your iPhone/iPad and create beautiful full-resolution high dynamic range (HDR) pictures!

Have you taken pictures, only to find out that the beautiful clouds were washed out, making the sky look like a white haze?  Or how about outdoor pictures where everything in the shade looked like a dark blob with no details?  Have you taken photos of scenes that included lights (indoors or outdoors), only to see that you had to compromise with an overly dark or overly bright final image?

The problem with taking only one photo of a scene that has a large range from bright to dark is that you have to choose whether you want to capture the brighter or the darker areas.

With TrueHDR, you can get the best of both worlds - capturing the details of bright and dark areas and then merging them into a single photo.

TrueHDR allows you to create high dynamic range (HDR) pictures, with vivid details in both bright and dark areas, on your iPhone and iPad. You can use it to take HDR pictures directly with your iPhone or iPod Touch camera, or to create HDR pictures from images in your photo library that were previously taken with a handheld camera with variable exposure settings.

HDR refers to the high dynamic range of light (brightness or darkness) that we see when we look at the world around us. Our eyes and brains are very good at simultaneously capturing the details in bright and dark areas, but cameras are not. Normally, by changing the exposure on a camera or using the autofocus feature on the iPhone camera, you decide whether you want to prioritize details in the brighter areas of a scene (for example, a sunny sky with clouds) or the darker areas (for example, your friend standing in the shade of a doorway or under a tree).

To create HDR pictures, you need to start with at least two photos, each capturing a different range of brightness in a scene. The challenges lie in merging those pictures and keeping the parts that you care about in each. If you don't have a tripod - and who does with the iPhone - it's hard to keep the camera perfectly still between taking the pictures. For TrueHDR, we automatically match the details of the two photos and align them. We then use sophisticated techniques to figure out the best parts of each image, and selectively adjust and merge them to look good together. And in the end, you're going to be looking at the result on computer screens that can only display a limited range of tones, so our calculations optimize the image for display on your screen.

The result is a photo that combines the best of both original images into one realistic-looking picture that is much closer to what your eyes originally saw. We streamline the process of capturing the two starting photos using your iPhone or iPod Touch, but you can also use TrueHDR to merge photos that you've taken with different exposure settings using another camera.