I'm not sure what your definition of a "trick" is. The quality of the results varies greatly depending on the algorithm used, which is maybe why you don't have

I'm not sure what your definition of a "trick" is. The quality of the results varies greatly depending on the algorithm used, which is maybe why you don't have a good impression of it. This one aligns the exposures and detects motion which is not something you can easily do by hand. In practice, I find my nexus 5 with HDR+ often takes superior pictures to my consumer grade DLSR, so much so that it's hard to justify taking the DSLR on trips anymore. For instance, compare these two pictures taken at the same spot with a nexus 5 and Canon EOS Rebel T2i. https://goo.gl/photos/8ZrXoEC283oJ3NmC9 https://goo.gl/photos/8ZrXoEC283oJ3NmC9 The nexus 5 one is just way better. The conventional camera struggles to keep even the foreground and midground properly exposed. The nexus 5 gets everything from the foreground to the sky, exactly as I saw it.