Everyone who knows me, knows I love to take pictures with my iPhone and fiddle with them. There are so many great apps that allow a person to fine tune or alter parts of an image. Most are a variety of filters to lighten or darken or make the picture look old. A few alow to crop and resize. With a few exceptions, all of the options are for touching up a picture after it has been taken.

Some of my more fun iPhone altered images are posted up on Hash Tag Pics.

An image was posted to Facebook yesterday by a friend who is a professional photographer (Crystal Clear Media). He owns a spot in Texas and is well known for his Dallas based sports team pictures. What got everyone’s attention was his post that it was taken with his iPhone (screen shot here):

What you might notice is that the sky or ground should be darker or brighter depending on which one is focused on with the iPhone. You will get a washed out sky if you focus on the ground or a ground with no detail if you focus on the clouds.

Andrew mentioned he used Pro HDR to take the picture. An app that has you take two pictures to recognize the bright and dark areas then marry the two together without needing your help editing. Cool!

From the app creator:

Unlike fake HDR apps that merely take a single photo and reprocess it (without actually adding any new detail), Pro HDR massively extends the dynamic range of your camera and produces beautiful results that you have to see to believe. Plus, Pro HDR is the only real HDR app that processes your photos at full resolution for the ultimate quality. Now you can take stunning high-resolution photos of all those scenes that are just too contrasty to capture in a single picture.

Just as an example, I am looking to take a picture of my notebook where normally I would get a bright screen and a over dark keyboard.

You are first asked to tap on a spot that is a ‘bright’ area. You will see the dark areas get darker, then tap the ‘Take picture #1) button.

The screen will change and ask you to tap on the ‘dark’ area of the screen.

You will see the screen adjust to balance the dark area brighter, washing out the ‘bright’ area you chose before. Tapping ‘Take picture #2″ will snap another picture.

Pro HDR will now take over and merge the two images together into a single balanced image.

The program now presents you with your image with sliders to adjust: Brightness, contrast, Saturation and Warmth. You can also ‘save’ the image or ’email’ it. The Save and eMail image size is adjustable in the settings area.

Below is the quick results of the two picts the apps took. You may notice that in the case of a close up image you have to be pretty precise with the alignment otherwise you will get an area that was in both images off a bit. This isn’t seen in the case of outside pictures.

This was a poor example of the fun results you can get with Pro HDR. I can see a lot of much nicer landscape pictures coming out of my iPhone.