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STAR198501103h5i
Participant
December 15, 2025
Question

HDR Toggle Greyed Out in Camera Raw (Photoshop Beta)

  • December 15, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 197 views

Afternoon's! 🙂

I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to get the HDR button active (instead of greyed out) in Adobe Photoshop Beta when I'm using Camera Raw. I'm specifically on the Beta version because of some new features I want to use for editing, but I noticed that in this Beta, the HDR toggle stays inactive for me.

Now, I know in Lightroom Classic and even in the cloud-based version of Lightroom, I can turn on HDR mode on a JPEG and see those brighter nit values just fine, so I’m a bit confused. I already went into Preferences > Technology Previews and enabled "Precise Color Management for HDR display," then restarted Photoshop Beta as instructed, but the HDR button in Camera Raw is still greyed out.

So I’m just looking for some guidance here: is this a known Beta limitation or a bug that anyone else has run into? Or is there another setting I might be missing to get HDR editing working properly in Photoshop Beta?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

1 reply

S
STAR198501103h5iAuthor
Participant
December 15, 2025

Quick update.
I was able to figure out why the HDR toggle in Camera Raw was disabled in Photoshop Beta, and I now have it working correctly inside Camera Raw.

The fix was enabling the option in Camera Raw Preferences to always open JPEGs with Camera Raw. This forces JPEGs to open in the full Camera Raw interface instead of the Camera Raw Filter, which is disabled for HDR by default. Once enabled, the HDR toggle becomes available and works as expected in Camera Raw.

However, here is the real issue I’m facing now:

Even though the image is edited in HDR inside Camera Raw, Photoshop opens the image as if it were an SDR image. The HDR luminance and brightness are lost, and the image appears dim and flat once it opens in Photoshop.

So to be very clear:
• HDR preview and adjustments are correct in Camera Raw
• Photoshop is interpreting the opened image as SDR

I’m attaching a short video showing the HDR edit in Camera Raw and the result immediately after opening the file in Photoshop.

If anyone knows how to force Photoshop to preserve the HDR state when opening the image (or if this is a known Photoshop Beta limitation), I’d appreciate the insight.

Thanks! 

G
Guillaume30365180kxgu
January 6, 2026

I'm searching how to export SDR view in Photoshop, with the same rendering as it appears in Camera Raw. I searched, many people are asking the same thing but nobody aswer to this question.

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