HDR photos with a smartphone, built-in versus my own method

On this blog, I have published some examples of HDR photos before, which I created manually by relying on auto-bracketing features in digital cameras and combining the multiple exposure photos using Luminance HDR. One could argue that this is obsolete because pretty much every smartphone camera app nowadays has a HDR feature built-in. As I will show below however, this often leaves much to be desired and it still makes a lot of sense to produce HDR photos the manual way, be it with the smartphone camera or a ‘real’ camera.

My most recent smartphone is a OnePlus Nord, but its built-in HDR is a general nuisance. It only engages when it believes there to be a need for it according to some vague heuristic. Even when it claims to be enabled, sometimes the result shows no HDR at all, probably because it failed to find matches between the images. The latter usually happens when HDR is most needed, when taking photos of sunsets that result in high contrast.

This made me look for an alternative camera app that offers exposure bracketing, such that not only could I make HDR photos when I want to, I can also make them the way I want instead of having to rely on the half-baked algorithm built into the native camera app. I found Open Camera, which proved a great solution.

In this blog post I will compare some HDR photos taken with both the OnePlus camera app (and one with Open Camera's HDR), and HDR photos of the same scene produced with my own workflow, as explained in the article on my website which I recently updated.

Example 1: OnePlus' HDR versus mine. As usual with the built-in HDR tonemapping in smartphones, it tries hard to show details everywhere by pretty much steamrollering the intensities into one flat dull result. The overall image is too bright, lacks saturation, and does not represent the scene how I experienced it. My HDR image might look a bit dark in comparison, but it much better represents the sensation of the actual scene when viewed in its own on a big screen.

Example 2: again, the OnePlus HDR makes things too bright and it looks more like a daytime shot with some colour filter than a shot taken at sunset.

Example 3: same remarks as above.

Example 4: again, the OnePlus HDR makes the sky a dull mess, while all the interesting things are happening there.

Example 5: this time, the OnePlus HDR has roughly the same overall brightness as mine, but local details are lacking, especially in the darker areas where everything is just clipped to black.

Example 6: here I first show the result from the OnePlus camera app, then the built-in HDR of the Open Camera app, and finally my own HDR. The first 2 are similar although the Open Camera result has some artefacts that I sometimes also experience with Luminance HDR when I didn't use a sufficiently large range of exposures to capture all intensities in the scene. But again, the automated HDRs are too bright and have a yellowish tint that does not correspond with how I experienced the scene.

Example 7: again OnePlus versus mine, and again the colours in the OnePlus image are washed out and despite its overall higher brightness, details in the darker areas are lacking compared to my image.

Example 8: (added 2022/08/14) this was a particularly challenging image due to the enormous dynamic range. Obviously, the OnePlus app only takes 2 or maybe 3 photos with a rather limited exposure range, and lost the subtleties in the sky colours. The result looks harsh and overly bright. I switched OpenCamera to 5 shots with an exposure range of ±3 stops, which allowed to capture the scene as it was. I had to tweak saturaton more than usual to end up with a result that matches how I experienced this scene in the real world.

Conclusion

Again, if you want to make HDR photos the same way as I do, check out the article on my website. One of the things that makes it fun to process one's own HDR photos, is the fact that it brings back a bit of the magic that used to be experienced when taking photos on film, and only seeing the results later on when the film had been developed. It is not exactly the same thing, but producing the HDR image from the raw bracketed photos does have a bit of a feel of “developing” the images.

More HDR

Since my previous post about HDR, I bought a more professional camera with both a larger, less noisy sensor, and a more advanced bracketing function. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 with the standard ‘pancake’ powered zoom lens. I still mostly follow the steps explained in my article about Luminance HDR, but with this camera the preprocessing step is almost always unnecessary. Here are some results, enjoy…

Sinds mijn vorige post over HDR heb ik een meer professionele camera gekocht met een grotere, minder ruizige sensor, en een meer geavanceerde bracketing-functie. De camera is een Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 met de standaard ‘pannenkoek’ power-zoomlens. Ik gebruik nog steeds grotendeels de workflow die ik uitgelegd heb in mijn artikel over Luminance HDR, maar met deze camera is de preprocessing-stap bijna altijd overbodig. Hier zijn een paar resultaten, geniet ervan…

Photography 101: avoid taking a photo with the sun shining into the lens. Puh!

Fotografie voor beginners: vermijd het nemen van foto's waarbij de zon in de lens schijnt. Puh!

The Arenberg castle near Leuven. Mind the crane, soon it will be impossible to take a photo like this without the new IMEC aquarium office building sticking out behind it like a sore thumb, courtesy of the great Flemish spatial planning and a certain mayor's delusions of grandeur.

Het Arenbergkasteel nabij Leuven. Let op de kraan, dankzij de fantastische ruimtelijke planning in Vlaanderen, en de grootheidswaanzin van een zekere burgemeester, zal het binnenkort onmogelijk zijn om een foto zoals deze te nemen zonder het nieuwe IMEC kantooraquarium dat de achtergrond verpest.

 I predict that if I will be taking a photo at this exact same location in ten years, it will be filled with asphalt roads and multiple specimens of the typical fake rustic villas that are prevalent in Belgium, as well as some of the newer-style shoeboxes.

Mijn voorspelling is dat als ik over tien jaar een foto neem op exact deze zelfde plek, hij gevuld zal zijn met asfaltwegen en meerdere specimens van de typisch Belgische faux-rustieke villa's en de recentere stijl van bewoonbare schoendozen.

 This was a royal pain due to the animated ‘raindrop’ lights hanging from the trees, which caused significant differences between the three differently exposed photos. These differences became ugly artifacts when creating the HDR image the straightforward way. The only solution was to manually erase all differences such that the lights were consistent between the three different exposures. I shortly tried Luminance's “Anti-ghosting” tool for this, but I could not get it to work, so I used the good old GIMP.

Dit liep niet van een leien dakje door de geanimeerde ‘regendruppel’-lichten in de bomen. Deze veroorzaakten grote verschillen tussen de drie foto's met verschillende belichting, wat dan tot lelijke artefacten leidde in de HDR-foto. De enige oplossing was deze verschillen manueel uit te vegen zodat de lichten consistent waren tussen de drie belichtingen. Ik had even geprobeerd de “Anti-ghosting” functie van Luminance hiervoor te gebruiken, maar ik kreeg het niet aan de praat dus ik heb de goeie oude GIMP gebruikt.

HDR photography with Luminance HDR and a cheap camera

If your camera has an ‘auto bracketing’ feature, it can take multiple shots of the same scene with different exposure values. Normally people use this to select a single photo with the best exposure afterwards, and throw away the others. However, it is possible to do more with this: by combining the information from all those photos, a single ‘High Dynamic Range’ photo can be created. This allows to capture much larger differences in light intensity within a single photo. There are some commercial packages that can do this, but there is also a great open-source alternative called Luminance HDR (formerly Qtpfsgui).

On my website you can find an article that explains how I use Luminance HDR to create HDR photos with a simple point-and-shoot camera that supports auto bracketing (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37). Below are a few examples of the kind of results I obtained from this.

HDR-foto's maken met Luminance HDR en een goedkope camera

Als uw camera ‘auto bracketing’ toelaat, kan hij meerdere foto's van dezelfde scène nemen met verschillende belichtingen. Normaal gebruiken mensen dit om achteraf de ene foto met de beste belichting uit te kiezen en de rest weg te gooien. Het is echter mogelijk om hier meer mee te doen: door de informatie van al die foto's te combineren kan één enkele foto met hoog dynamisch bereik (High Dynamic Range of HDR) gemaakt worden. Dit laat toe om een veel groter bereik aan lichtintensiteiten weer te geven in één enkele foto. Er zijn hiervoor enkele commerciële pakketen beschikbaar, maar er is ook een uitstekend open-source alternatief, Luminance HDR genaamd (voorheen Qtpfsgui).

Op mijn website kan u (in het Engels) een artikel vinden dat uitlegt hoe ik Luminance HDR gebruik om HDR-foto's te maken met een eenvoudige compacte camera die automatische bracketing ondersteunt (een Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37). Hieronder vindt u enkele resultaten die ik hiermee behaald heb.