Editing HDR Images in ACR but unable to use Photoshop

Question

I'm editing Sony RAW files on a Windows machine in Adobe ACR on a 1,600 nit display. Everything works great while in ACR and I can export my final image to avif. But if I want to edit the image further in Photoshop itself, the image color gets ruined. I did some research and found something about enabling HDR accurate color in Preferences, Technology Previews; however, this option is missing on my machine. As I can edit the imager just fine in ACR, why is it I'm not able to use Photoshop, or am I just missing something?

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

Some places for you to look:

This link is one of the best articles on the HDR editing features, because it’s by one of the lead Adobe engineers of that feature.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained

This is what it says (bold formatting is mine):

Using “Edit in Photoshop” with an HDR photo will open a document in Photoshop in 32-bit mode. Note that Photoshop itself currently only supports displaying HDR photos on macOS (Windows support is in progress). To display HDR content correctly in Photoshop on macOS, go to the Technology Previews section of the Photoshop Preferences dialog and check the Precise color management for HDR display option.

It’s been about 6 months since that article was written, so I don’t know if that situation has changed (I use a Mac).

If you want to be optimistic that maybe things have changed, you might check the HDR article by Greg Benz, linked below. That page has a number of tests and troubleshooting steps which include Windows.

https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr/

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