Dynamic Light for the iPhone

As an active “iPhoneographer“, I love to try new photography and camera-related apps from the App Store.  I recently discovered a new one called Dynamic Light (99¢) that promises, in the words of the developer to “give you the best and most vibrant HDR-like look on any mobile platform”.  So I downloaded it and gave it a shot (no pun intended).

I started with a shot of my office building:

The Dynamic Light interface allows you to move a dial to adjust the amount of “HDR-ness” being applied to the image:

As you can see, you can apply this effect anywhere from 0% to 100% intensity to the image.  For drama, I applied it at 100%:

It turned out surprisingly well, giving the photo a great dramatic insensity, especially on an overcast day like today’s, which rendered the original photo flat.

You can also choose other effects to overlay on the photo:

These are pretty decent and I was pretty happy with the B&W conversion applied to my photo:

All in all, this app does have promise, but I did find two niggling issues: the first time I took a photo using the in-app camera function, it worked great.  However, every time after that, until I rebooted, it would take the photo, but then the interface just showed a black screen where the photo should’ve been.  I was able to negate this by taking the photo with the iPhone’s own Camera app then importing it into Dynamic Light, but I shouldn’t have to do this.  Hopefully this bug will be addressed by the developers soon.  Secondly, one time when I did try to save a photo, it acted like it was processing then saving the photo, but the photo was nowhere to be found in my Camera Roll.  I only had this happen once out of the ten or so photos I tried, so I’m willing to put the blame on iOS for this one.

All in all, I think this app has some great features and functionality, but a little more polish would make a huge difference.