A couple of months ago I purchased the Photo Enhance Pro by Mark Wheadon App off of Amazon for 99 cents,$4.99 on the Android Market. It is a simple app that tonemaps your cell phone snaps. While I am not a fan of Pseudo HDR’s I am however a fan of the HDR look and the possibilities of seeing every picture as such. Even simple cell phone pictures hold possibilities for me, I know they are just point and trash pictures but I have to see what they could be in HDR. So, I downloaded Photo Enhance Pro.
The Interface:
Very simple interface. You open the App and it prompts you to select an image from your gallery, pretty simple not much to really show. You can select how much you want to tonemap the image by scrolling through what the App calls “Subtlety“. From there you can also adjust the Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, and Tone of the generated image.
The Effects:
The Good:
- It allows you to get a somewhat HDR effect on your cell phone snapshots for those HDR junkies out there that wouldn’t have there cell snaps any other way.
- Very simple interface to use.
- There is a free version that allows you full use of the App, but will not allow you to save them at high resolution.
- A very nice “High Black” feature for high contrast black and whites.
- You can adjust the essentials as well: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Tone and Crop.
- It does exactly what it is supposed to, it tonemaps pictures. Unlike the many photo apps out there that have an over saturated amount of crap in them.
- Unlike many other camera apps, it works on full resolution images, it does not minimize them first before you can play, thus destroying the quality. Awesome touch!
The Bad:
- My only reservation with this app is the Maximum Effect that yields the standard muddy HDR images that many poor HDR programs generate. I would never subject any photo to that much tonemapping, but there are people out there that would, but those are the ones that give true HDR a bad name. I really wish the maximum effect were taken out for that reason, but this is simply a personal preference.
The Bottom Line:
While it may not be Photomatix, for 99 cents, I don’t think you can go wrong! It does what it is meant to and very well for a cell phone app. Great job Mark.
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
