Review: Trusight Pro 1.2 – Great Exposure Fix and Now Full-Res

Trusight Pro
Version 1.2
Price: $2.99

Bottom Line: Now an excellent full-res app for all first-line exposure enhancements.

When shooting on my iPhone, I rely on exposure enhancing, Dynamic Range Correction (DRC) apps such as Perfectly Clear, SmartCam and AutoAdjust as a first step in nearly all of my iPhone photo processing. These apps help remove the gray cast sometimes found in raw iPhone photos, help improve shadow detail, and restore brilliant color, luminance and contrast to an image. A good DRC app does a superior job of bringing out the detail in 3/4-tones and shadows while not blowing out the details of the highlights in an image.

Trusight Pro by Trusight, Inc. is now one of the better DRC exposure fixing apps. On any iPhone, the app restores color and dynamic range to an image. The most recent update, version 1.2, fixes the app’s biggest flaw and now Trusight Pro saves photos in full resolution — up to 2048×1536 pixels.

The app is very easy to use. I love the three-level interface of the app. It’s easy enough for a complete novice, yet tucked away in the Pro screen are slider controls for precise control over enhancement. There are three presets — mild, medium and strong. Either mild or medium worked great for me most of the time. There’s an Auto setting that’s closer to Mild than Medium. I found that these three settings did the best job in correcting all but the darkest images. The Strong setting ran a little too warm and too noisy in my test images. The Auto setting worked great for me most of the time.

For finer control over image corrections, the Pro setting gives you access to the six attributes that Trusight Pro adjusts. Pro mode gives you sliders for DRC Dark, DRC Light, Balance, Contrast, Brightness, and Smooth or de-noise. Unlike Perfectly Clear, there is no Sharpness adjustment.

I think Trusight Pro excels at exposure enhancement. It removes the gray cast of many iPhone images, improves the luminance where needed in the image and corrects color saturation. It does a very good job of fixing darker areas of an image and restoring shadow details.

To my eye, Trusight also adds warmth to the color corrections. It seems to add more red than Perfectly Clear. Contrast adjustments aren’t as heavy as Perfectly Clear. Depending on your preference, you may feel the color of Trusight Pro feels slightly washed out.

It applies a slight blur to denoise the image as well. It does an excellent job in improving shadow details without sacrificing highlights — something it does better than most other apps in this class. Even in my worst-case, poorly exposed Ciudad Antigua test image above, it still kept much of the details of the clouds while filling in the cars and cobblestones.

Trusight Pro has an excellent Compare mode with a one-button toggle that switches between the original and enhanced image. To me, this works much better than an undo in that there’s no risk of losing your effect or accidentally applying a filter. I think Trusight’s Compare mode is very well implemented and I’d like to see more apps work like this. the update also adds a very handy Undo feature which is nice to have instead of starting over with an image.

With the 1.2 update, Trusight Pro now saves images in full resolution, up to 3.2 megapixels. After processing, it presents the option to save to the Photo Album in either Standard 600×800 pixels or High Resolution. As sometimes I simply want to quickly scrub an image for a quick upload to Facebook, I appreciate the option of being able to tailor my resolution size for final output.

The app can be used as a camera or images can be imported straight from your photo library. The app’s built-in camera function now saves at full-res as well, but if you shoot within the app, only processed images will be saved your camera roll for future editing.

One issue that I overlooked initially (which a reader pointed out) are the splash screen and processing animations. Ordinarily I’m a fan of animations and things to watch while your image processes in apps such as Hipstamatic and the Polaroid apps — I feel like I’m in the minority here. Trusight contains animations which run while the app processes images. While not a dealbreaker for me, I find them to be distracting and I’d rather see the immediate difference between my before and after images. Hopefully, we’ll see the option to disable the animations in a future update.

There is now a lite, watermarked version, Trusight, which saves to 1200×1600 and allows you to try the app for free.

Trusight Pro is still $2.99 USD, but with the quality of the exposure correction and the full-res out put of this latest update, I feel it’s definitely worth the purchase. The Standard/High Res output option allows you to tailor your photos for web or print. With the new Lite version, you can try it now for free to see if you like how it handles color and detail. Trusight Pro 1.2 is now an excellent DRC app for all first-line exposure enhancements.

=M=

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Related link: Trusight

Updated April 22, 2010, 13:18 pm.