Flash Hero
Version 1.2
Bottom line: Two of the three filters work poorly.
Flash Hero is a new “flash fixer” app from Asasa Software which uses three different kinds of exposure enhancements to fix the lighting of a photo.
No two images are the same and many times an exposure enhancement app that does a great job on one image works poorly with another. That’s why I keep several exposure enhancers in my iPhone. Flash Hero attempts to give you three different types of exposure enhancement in one app. The idea is that of the three, one of them will work best to fix your image. It’s a great concept. Unfortunately, two of the filters work poorly and the third is redundant and unnecessary if you already have another slider-based flash fixer, such as Perfectly Clear, Auto Adjust or FlashPhix. All three of these apps produce better results more easily.
Flash Hero screenshot
Flash Hero has a great interface. It opens to the control screen where you can either snap a picture or import an image from your iPhone’s photo library. There are buttons for the three methods of exposure fixes and the slider above changes characteristics based on the method chosen. There’s a nice, optional full-screen preview that toggles easily between the original and enhanced images. The operation of the app is well thought out and works quite nicely. Flash Hero also saves images at full-resolution.
The filters, though, don’t work well for me. The only filter I got good results with is the Levels adjustment, which functions the same as Photoshop’s Input Levels adjustment. Basically, the highlight and shadow cut-off levels are selected and the app then expands the range of pixel intensity values — normalization.
I thought the the Equalize and Balance adjustments produced poor results. The default Equalize values yielded poor contrast and a washed out image. It also added a blue cast to my image, taking out a lot of the warmth. Adjusting the two slider controls never gave me good color, leaving my images flat. The Balance adjustment — which is not an overall color balance adjustment — worked a little better on my test images (not great), but it applied an overall greenish-blue cast to the image. Neither filter behaves the same way you’d expect from similar adjustments in Photoshop. I’d like to see these two filters create results more consistent with Photoshop’s Gamma adjustment or Equalize command. This might be as simple as compensating for the color casts that these two functions seem to add once applied in Flash Hero.
I’m always looking for a better exposure enhancer. I like the concept and the user-interface of Flash Hero, but two of the three adjustments I found to be mostly unusable for flash fixing. I don’t like Flash Hero’s current Equalize and Balance adjustments. These functions need improvement. And even at $0.99 USD, the Levels function isn’t unique enough on its own to warrant a purchase if you use another slider-based flash fixer.
App Store link: Flash Hero
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Related links: Auto Adjust | FlashPhix | Perfectly Clear
