Vibrance HDR

A side project I've been working on recently is Vibrance HDR, which allows you to create High Dynamic Range images from three auto-exposure bracketed (AEB) images.

It uses the same algorithms as Open Camera's HDR mode, but with more configuration (e.g., choice of HDR strength, or using different tonemapping options, as well as other post-processing options to tweak brightness, contrast and so on). You can take AEB photos using Open Camera's exposure bracketing ("Expo {}") photo mode, or any other camera app that supports it: Vibrance's Help has a guide on how to take AEB photos with Open Camera, Camera FV-5, A Better Camera, Snap Camera HDR.

It also supports creating "HDR" images from a single image (this is comparable to Open Camera's DRO photo mode - sometimes referred to as "fake HDR", this is more a case of local contrast enhancement).

Vibrance HDR is not intended to be a general purpose photo editor - there are already plenty of free apps for that. It's intended to fill what seems to be a gap in the Android market (single-image "HDR effect" applications are commonplace, but it's much harder to find anything that allows creation of HDR images from multiple AEB photos). I started working on this to help me investigate and improve Open Camera's HDR algorithm, but maybe this can be of use to others.

It's currently restricted to creating HDR from 3 images, but support for more input images is planned.

Note that Vibrance HDR contains ads and isn't Open Source I'm afraid - don't worry, I don't plan on changing my stance for Open Camera! And if you're interested in the HDR algorithms themselves, the code is available as part of Open Camera's source code.
Update: as of v1.13, Vibrance HDR is now without ads, and released as Open Source.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark,
I love your apps and I have downloaded them. I will be contributing to the donation soon. I was looking around for an app which can perform image averaging like what is done in Photoshop. However, I could not find any such good app. Most apps take multiple shots over a 10 s frame and then combine. However, they do not align the images together. Taking a look at your Vibrance HDR app, I realized that you probably have the resources to make a good app as you have the code for the alignment anyways. Image averaging would probably be a great way to reduce noise as well as get long exposure shots with higher accuracy than the current smartphones can. Here are some links which might help you figure out what is actually done to perform an image averaging.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm
https://petapixel.com/2013/05/29/a-look-at-reducing-noise-in-photographs-using-median-blending/

It has some excellent potential.

Regards,
A. M.

[Mark]

Thanks for the info and links (and donation!) I've been thinking about adding support for some kind of image averaging (could be as a photo mode in Open Camera for long exposure, and/or in Vibrance for an existing set of images). I did note the only image averaging applications I could find for Android didn't seem to do auto-alignment, so yes that's code I already have. I'll take a look at those links.

[A. M.]

Hi Mark, I signed up with SourceForge and I have provided more feedback in the discussion for the open camera app. Please take a look, these are some really cool ideas which will make your app mind blowing. I would love to help in any way, I am just beginning to learn android app development so not even close to be able to interpret your app haha. But I am good with photography, so if you would like me to give a beta run for your apps let me know.

Regards,
A. M.

[Mark]

Thanks for the feedback!

[Anonymous]

Can this app be used for focus stacking within android? I can't seem to find an app that takes multiple images for a focus stack...

[Mark]

It can't I'm afraid - but I hope to work on this for a future version. Plain image stacking (averaging) will be easier - focus stacking is harder due to different lens distortion on images.

[Anonymous]

Mark, on a similar note - I hope you can work on something like this - https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-photography-with.html

[Mark]

Thanks for the link. I've started working on an image averaging mode.

[Anonymous]

Hi mark help my open camera is lg4