Adobe recently released Lightroom Classic 14, which included a few HDR related updates:

• Added file formats with HDR export support for ISO gain map
• Experience HDR in secondary display with added multiple-view support

Being able to create, edit, and view HDR photos in my photography flow is something I’ve wanted for a long time now. Between the latest features in Lightroom and improved support for HDR photos in iOS and MacOS, we’re almost there.

What I Mean By “HDR”

“HDR” has been used to describe tone-mapping within the context of a traditional 8-bit image file format. It was popular years ago when digital cameras didn’t quite have the dynamic range to capture a scene, so we’d end up bracketing exposures and combining them in post. The results were not always great. This is not what I mean by HDR (sorry for the confusion).

When I say “HDR”, I’m talking about editing and exporting photos to have a higher dynamic range, when viewed, than traditional SDR images.

The first wide-spread use of this kind of HDR was photos taken with an iPhone. By using the built-in camera app, you could take a photo of a scene with a very wide dynamic range. The phone would capture the scene, and when displaying the photo back it would brighten the areas of the display beyond your brightness setting, to create a wider dynamic range when viewed. By this point we’ve probably all experienced this kind of photo on our phones in one app or another. You’ll notice it as the light parts of an image suddenly “brightening up” after the photo loads in.

Why I Care About This

I love taking landscape photos, and whether landscape or any other subject, I’m a big sucker for high contrast images. I want to be able to share my photos with others and let them get that Brightest Brights and Darkest Darks viewing experience that I enjoy.

It’s also closer to reality. Our eyes and brain are able to piece together scenes with an astonishing dynamic range of 18-20 stops, yet a typical computer screen can only display 6-10. Modern HDR displays can push that up much closer to the range we see with our eyes, giving us a much more realistic experiencing when viewing photos.

The Editing Experience: Great

The editing experience has gotten Really Good at this point. Lightroom’s HDR editing features are intuitive and easy to use, and the display of HDR content is now possible in fullscreen view as well as the library loupe and compare views, in addition to the editing view. Simply click the HDR button in the editing pane, and crank up the highlight or exposure to get going.

Surely Lightroom will continue to offer more HDR features, but frankly it’s plenty good enough right now to do what I want.

The Exporting Experience: Good

Recently Lightroom updates have added the ability to export in JPEG w/ Gain Map, which expands the number of devices that can view exported photos. And LR still supports JPEG XL and AVIF output formats.

There seems to be some issues between JXL files exported from LR and displayed in Photos (see below), but it’s unclear if this is a bug from Adobe or a bug from Apple.

The Viewing Experience: Not Great

While editing and exporting photos in HDR is at least Good Enough today, sharing and viewing those files elsewhere is still Not Great. Having played around with various apps and settings lately, here’s what I’ve found:

• Photos App on iOS 18 (18.0.1) will properly display AVIF, JXL, and JPEG w/ Gain Map photos in HDR, properly.
• … with the exception of JXL images, in which it seems to blow out the highlights. I’m not sure if this is an Apple bug or Adobe bug, but right now I think it’s an Apple bug.
• If you want to get these images into Photos, you must use air drop or drag-and-drop them into Photos. Messages will convert the image to JPG when sending.
• (Update: Except maybe you can adjust the file type when sending by taping “options” and choosing “current format”. This is not obvious in any case.)
• Photos App on MacOS 14.5 will display JXL files in HDR, but not AVIF or JPEG w/ Gain Map.
• Safari and Preview should display them correctly in MacOS 14.6+, but earlier versions of MacOS will not show them in HDR.
• Some versions of Chrome, somewhere, might work. Maybe.

So, showing off your photos in HDR is still a crap sandwich, unfortunately. If you have patience you can import these into your own photo library easily enough, but good luck sharing them in any way beyond holding up your phone and showing them to someone else.

Hopefully in a few years we’ll have all of this ironed out and it’ll be easier to share these with others.

My Workflow

Right now, in October of 2024, my workflow is:

1. Take photo with Sony A7r iV.
2. Edit in Lightroom’s HDR mode,
3. Export as JPEG XL, HDR, Rec.2020 color space.
4. AirDrop file to my phone.
5. Enjoy by myself, or hold my phone up to show others.

Conclusions

HDR support for editing and exporting is decent. If you’re into this, it’s a fine time to edit some HDR exports, and put them with the rest of your photos. Hopefully in a couple years it’ll be much easier to share these, and you can go back to the well and pluck those old photos out to share around.

Progress is being made, and eventually this will work everywhere. Just gotta be patient until then.