Microsoft talks up the advantages of HDR photography and videography in Universal Windows Platform apps

Kareem Anderson

Over the years, great camera tech is being transposed from the often expensive and hyper-specialized lenses of SLR, DSLR, and video recorders to the hardware and software everyday consumers are using on a regular basis. Understanding the shift and focusing on consumer photography coupled with the accessibility of phones or tablets to capture images, Microsoft built API support for the coming wave of amateur-turn-professional photographers into Windows 10.

Specifically, Windows 10 and the Universal Windows Platform has support for High Dynamic Range (HDR), and Microsoft wants its developers to know:

High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR) is a technique that uses multiple exposures of the same shot in order to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard digital imaging or photographic techniques. The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) empowers you to build apps that take HDR photographs and videos, using digital compositing to overcome some of the limitations of standard photography and videography.”

With a support framework in place, developers can enable post-processing or real-time on-camera capturing experiences around HDR manipulation by using a list of tools such as MediaCapture, AdvancePhotoCapture, SceneAnalysisEffect, and HDRVideo.

The Windows team briefly describes how, where and to what effect each of the various HDR-related tools can do to enhance a developer’s HDR support offerings with a semi-lengthy walkthrough that involves code samples and side-by-side comparisons.

In the end, the Windows team would like to encourage developers who are building video- and image-based applications and experiences to consider enabling HDR functionality as more consumers get acquainted with the lighting manipulation access it grants.

With a smartphone marketing cresting on saturation, more OEMs are looking to differentiate their offerings and the camera seems to be an attractive place to do so. Using Microsoft’s UWP development environment, now app developers can also begin to differentiate atop of smartphone and tablet makers escalating war of camera differentiation.