With photos being one of the most important things our devices produce these days, it’s important that what you take reflects as close as possible to what you see. Sometimes lighting, cloudiness, shadow and other factors can have a degrading effect on the image that’s captured. When that happens you need an app that can take that image and make necessary corrections and enhancements so you get a finish that’s worth posting.
OrasisHD is just such an app. For just $1.99, you can take advantage of over a decade of academic research that helped in the design and development of OrasisHD. It’s sister app, Orasis, is available for free if you are not ready to make the purchase and would like to see on a more simplified level what the app provides. The only limitations to the free version are limited resolution settings and intermittent ads.
The way it works is that you upload a single image to the app. It takes that image and then goes to work using a proprietary algorithm to process the image. This involves identifying the dark and bright image regions and enhancing them to make them clearer and reveal items in those regions that were previously not visible – think objects that are hidden in a photo because they are in a shadow.
What’s important to note is that OrasisHD does a superb job of not changing anything that is already perfect. This means is ignores all regions and areas that are already well-exposed. So as your image is being fixed to expose and clarify items that are unclear, it keeps the good parts intact.
Once you have uploaded the image, you have the option to let the app do an automatic enhancement and cleanup or you can go to the MANUAL tab and make the enhancements yourself. If you choose to manually fix your image, there are various areas to update and all you do is tap and swipe to move data points and select different values for various parameters. The app creators highly recommend darker images, because it’s easier to add brightness to those darker regions of the image.
It may be a little confusing at first, but with practice, your understanding of the app, the settings and what to change to fix different types of imaging issues. The more you use the app, the more comfortable you’ll get with using it and you’ll see a significant improvement in the images you create.
I would love to see the ability to print directly from the app, once you have your image the way you want it. While most will choose to immediately share via social media, the absence of direct printing is not a game changer.
OrasisHD should be an app in your possession on any device from which you snap photos. It will turn every image you take into the original masterpiece that caught your eye.
Fixing totally dark images is not the most difficult thing – other apps can help here, even the native iOS photos app. However, images that have BOTH well exposed and dark regions (like in the case of shadows) are the most difficult to fix. And here is where Orasis shines.
