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Photo showing default Perfectly Clear exposure fix

Previously, I’d introduced you to iPhone photography, or “iPhoneography.” One of the advantages to shooting with an iPhone, I’d mentioned, is the availability of thousands of inexpensive apps that allow you to “process” and share your images on the go.

While the iPhone’s camera does many things surprisingly well, it is a camera with a fixed shutter speed and an f/2.8 lens. Exposure compensation is performed on the sensor, where the ISO is adjusted. Sometimes, the images shot on an iPhone are a little flat, dark, or may have a gray cast. Fortunately, there’s an app for that! Here are three of the easiest and best “flash fixing” exposure enhancing, Dynamic Range Correction apps currently available.

There are many “flash fix” apps available. Most simply crank up the brightness of your image, leaving it flat and washed out. Good exposure enhancers will use contrast stretching or normalization to to fix up a dark or gray image. The best ones perform apply several algorithms to do their magic.

Perfectly Clear [App Store link] is the exposure enhancer I use most often. One-button image scrubbing — it quickly and easily improves the sharpness, exposure, saturation and contrast. I usually run my images through Perfectly Clear before doing anything else to them. It has two settings and a user adjustable pro pane for fine tuning your image tweaks. The app cranks the sharpness up pretty high by default — I usually pull it down a bit for my photos. The picture above was enhanced by Perfectly Clear in just a few seconds.

Auto Adjust [App Store link] uses “contrast stretching” or normalization to help correct exposure. Its adjustable enhancement produces excellent results on many images that would otherwise be lost due to underexposure as well as automatically correcting the contrast of more properly exposed images. Auto Adjust is also one of my go-to apps.

Trusight Pro [App Store link] is a recent entry into the exposure fix app market. I love the three-level interface of the app. It’s easy enough for a complete novice, yet tucked away in the Pro screen are slider controls for precise control over enhancement. Trusight Pro excels at exposure enhancement. It removes the gray cast of many iPhone images, improves the luminance where needed in the image and corrects color saturation. It does a very good job of fixing darker areas of an image and restoring shadow details.

I use these apps on the go. They are all fast and easy to use. They create a good starting point to work on your images in other apps, or to simply improve the look of your snapshots before uploading to Facebook or Flickr — all from your iPhone!

Next time, we look at ‘Photoshop for the iPhone.’

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"Just Desserts", shot and processed on an iPhone

I have a camera. Sometimes I use it to make phone calls.

Although we have a couple of DSLRs in the house, my camera of choice is my iPhone. Many of you have one, but have probably never thought to use it for any serious photography.

There has been interest in iPhone photography (or iPhoneography as it’s called) almost since Apple first announced the iPhone in January 2007. Even before the iPhone hit the streets, there were Flickr groups devoted to pictures taken with an iPhone.

Simply put, iPhoneography is shot and processed completely on an iPhone. Search the web for “iPhoneography” and you’ll find hundreds of websites, blogs and photoblogs and thousands of photographers, both amateur and professional, creating some great photographs with their iPhones.

Out of the box, it’s not the greatest camera in terms of quality, but it’s not the worst either. Depending on your iPhone model, it’s either a 2 or 3 megapixel camera. The dynamic range isn’t the best, but it captures color surprisingly well for a camera phone. The photos it creates are good enough to share over Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. You can also make high quality prints up to 8″ x 10″ and get acceptable results for even larger prints.

Where the iPhone camera shines are the availability of thousands of photography-related apps that are available to capture, process and share your images and the fact that your iPhone is the camera that’s probably always with you.

For many reasons, the iPhone allows you to get photos you wouldn’t be able to with any other camera. The iPhone allows you to capture those moments you wish you could if ‘you’d have only brought your camera.’ For street photography, because of its small size and ubiquity, the iPhone rarely changes the dynamics of a scene, allowing you to capture a moment without effecting the subject.

In addition to being a phone, PDA, and whatever else you add to it, by spending a few dollars to buy the right apps, your iPhone is also a camera and virtual darkroom in your pocket. Once you’ve shot your image, there are thousands of apps available (of varying quality) to correct exposure, to tweak color and to quickly and easily apply any number of effects.

There are Dynamic Range Corrections apps like Perfectly Clear for one-step image enhancement. Browse the Apple App Store to find the powerful Photoshop-like image editors Photogene and PhotoForge which allow you to crop, rotate, and adjust all aspects of your color — all on your iPhone. There are apps that can easily apply many stylistic effects such as grunge, comic, tilt shift, monochrome, lo-fi and lomo, sepia and others. Many popular apps are available such as Hipstamatic, Camera Bag and Lo-Mob that recreate the look of film and shooting with vintage and toy cameras. It’s possible to do all of your image processing on the iPhone.

Photography with an iPhone can capture snapshots that you may have missed, it can be an exercise in creativity, or it can even be an art in itself — a form of digital lo-fi — as more photographers are discovering. In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring the capabilities of the iPhone. I’ll be sharing apps and techniques I’ve learned that will help you get the most from this overlooked little camera that you probably have with you.

I love my camera and I love to hear “Wow! I can’t believe you shot that with an iPhone!”

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Marty Yawnick also pens Life In LoFi, one of the leading iPhoneography blogs. You can follow him on Twitter under the name MartyNearDFW. Check out LifeInLoFi.com for more on iPhone photography.