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Review: Relight – HDR camera with live preview

Can HDR really make you a better photographer?

Price: £2.29 / $2.99
Version: 1.0.1
Size: 10.5 MB
Developer: Code Organa LLC
Platform: iPhone and iPad

App Store Download button

High Dynamic Range (HDR), once a feature reserved for the chunkiest of pro cameras has been sat on your iPhone gathering dust for a while now. Can this new app open your eyes to this advanced yet often misunderstood feature and liberate you from your beloved auto camera settings?

As we’ve reported before, HDR captures multiple images at differing levels of light to create a picture much more on par with what your eyes actually see.

Once opened, Relight resembles the normal iOS camera setup, but behind a menu you’ll find over 50 lighting and artistic effects that you can preview live before you’ve taken a photo. You can also use any of the same effects on your photos from your camera roll although it seems from the results that this may not as be as impressive as actually capturing a HDR image at source.

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Don’t let restaurant mood lighting stop your quest for Instagram domination!

Where to use HDR?

We’ve trialled a number of HDR apps before including Fusion and Hydra both offering HDR modes and discovered that HDR is a good option for landscape photos. Unless you are wanting to experiment with artistic effects it’s also best to stay away from photographing people. Unlike the other apps we’ve reviewed, the live preview of Relight allows you to at least see the horrific mess that you are about to create.

As well as 8 different lots of presets including; enhance, low light, artistic, clarity, sky, dramatic, overexposure and fog you can also fine tune with brightness, detail, saturation and other settings. Once you’ve applied an effect to the live viewer though it’s quite easy to get lost and reset to a default setting.

IMG_0184

Low light mode can bring out hidden detail, but often leads to a horrible grainy image

Also in live preview, once you’ve found the right mode you still have to tuck the menu away before you can get to the shutter, by which point after tinkering with settings your arms are getting quite tired.

A nice touch though, is that you can export as a PNG or TIFF file, and if you are spending a considerable amount of time on your photos, that’s an option you want. Of course you can also share your creations on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

So will this app Relight your fire for HDR photography? It’s not going to replace the inbuilt camera for a quick snap but if you are going to dabble in HDR, it’s a lot easier to create a great image with a preview rather than relying on guesswork.

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Some of the ‘artistic’ HDR effects are particularly dramatic