Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

Auto Adjust

I like free. As an end user, free apps are always good. It’s nicer when the free apps are well done and useful. Auto Adjust is one of those.

Auto Adjust by Joe Macirowski is free for a limited time! This is not a feature-crippled “lite” version, but the full version.

I’ve reviewed Auto Adjust and it’s one of my favorite apps here on LoFi. Unlike many of the “flash fixer” apps available, it’s more than just a flash enhancer which simply brightens images. Auto Adjust uses “contrast stretching” or normalization to help correct exposure. Its adjustable enhancement produces excellent results on many images that would otherwise be lost due to underexposure as well as automatically correcting the contrast of more properly exposed images. Auto Adjust is one of my go-to apps.

This is one of the better exposure enhancement apps available in the App Store. It’s highly recommended at its regular price of $0.99 USD. I think it’s an essential app while it’s free. I’m not sure how long the free offer will last, so if you don’t already have Auto Adjust, grab it now!

App Store link: Auto Adjust

=M=

December 29, 2009
Fort Worth, Texas

"Isham Cemetery with a Dusting of Snow"

Toolbox: AutoStitch, AutoAdjust, MonoPhix

Ten minutes from downtown sits our neighborhood on the east side of Fort Worth. It’s one of the areas of the DFW Metroplex that still has a somewhat rural feel. On the weekends, you often see people riding their horses down the medians on John T. White Road. When I first moved to this area back in the mid-1990’s, it was still a mail rural route.

There’s an old cemetery across from a woodframe church near some new housing subdivisions. I’ve only seen evidence of one funeral there in the years I’ve lived here.

Today, we had our third snow of the season — freakishly winter-like for an area that should be sunny and in the 60’s this time of year. Driving past old Isham Cemetery, the gray sky and the light dusting of the snow over the open field of the old cemetery made it feel like winter.

=M=

Auto Adjust

One of my favorite exposure enhancement apps, AutoAdjust, has just been updated to version 2.0. The new version features mostly performance enhancements, including better preview rendering, more intuitive sliders, and an improved gamma adjustment.

Not all exposure enhancement or “flash enhancement” apps work the same on the same image. An image that still looks bad with one app may be usable when fixed with another. I keep several exposure enhancement apps on my iPhone for that reason. AutoAdjust is one of them.

AutoAdjust works great with many underexposed images, as well as adding just the right amount of punch and contrast to a decent looking image. Highly recommended!

I have several promo codes for AutoAdjust 2 in the app store. They only work in the U.S. App Store. I’ll send one promo code to each of the first several readers who request one in this post’s comments — one code per reader, please. Be sure to include an email address somewhere in your post for me to send it to. Don’t forget to leave feedback in the App Store.

App Store link: AutoAdjust 2

I’d like to thank the developer, Joe Macirowski, for giving us the promo codes.

Fort Worth, Texas
White Elephant Saloon

=M=

Empty Dance Floor

Toolbox: Camera Genius, AutoAdjust

Auto Adjust

Auto Adjust
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Recommend!

Auto Adjust by Joe Macirowski is a new app that uses a different algorithm to adjust dark or washed-out areas of your images. Auto Adjust is more than just a “flash enhancer” which simply brightens your images and can wash them out and cause them to look flat. This app uses “contrast stretching” or normalization to help correct exposure. Thinking about the theory behind contrast stretching makes my brain hurt. It’s something we take for granted every time we do color or luminance adjustment in Photoshop, but like writing PostScript, I’d rather have an application do all of the under the hood stuff for me rather than learning the actual code.

However it works its magic, Auto Adjust does a great job of enhancing dark images and I found it can also do a decent job of adding punch and contrast to a flat, washed out image.

Read the rest of this entry →