HDR edited images - once exported look flat & over exposed - why is this happening to me?

[michelleo62058479]

hello - I was hoping someone could help me - HDR edited images - once exported look flat - why is this happening to me? I have been following tutorials - I edit in HDR mode - it looks great in adobe lightroom - but then once I go to export out the images as JPG's - and open them from my folder they look flat -& over exposed. 

[Jao vdL]

Apple's preview app has many bugs displaying HDR content. It cannot correctly display any HDR still images correctly. The only apps that can correctly display avif and jpegXL HDR images are Photoshop with the options turned on and Chrome. Nothing else works correctly. This indeed really limits your options because basically nobody can actually display these images correctly. I have submitted these as bugs to Apple but they seem to not really care. Maybe if more people submit these bigs they might.

[michelleo62058479]

Thank you Jao, That is refreshing to know I am not soing seomthing wrong - I have been going around in circles trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. I will contact apple about this as well. 

Do you know if the printed version of these photo's will print as they show up in chrome or lightroom - or will they print a they show up on my screen in the finder? 

also - I hate to ask - but how do I turn on this preferance in photoshop - I did try to open them in photoshop and they were no better. - It seems only chrome and lightroom are workgin for me. 

[JohanElzenga]

Prints are always SDR. What HDR editing does is show highlights brighter than paper white. When you print something, you can obviously not print brighter than the paper you are printing on.

[Jao vdL]

Johan already answered your printing question. Prints cannot do HDR so they will not be able to reproduce the effect. They will look more like the sdr preview you see in the print panel. Better than the image looks in preview but not as good as the HDR image seen in Lightroom. HDR really is only possible on emissive displays, not on prints that rely on reflected light. You typically want to create a separate virtual copy edited in SDR mode for printing therefore as the SDR preview from a HDR edit is usually not as good as an intentionally edited SDR image.

Regarding Photoshop, you need to enable the option for "precise color management for HDR display" in the Technology Previews section of Preferences. This will make its display identical to Lightroom and will make it correctly display avif and jpeg XL files. Not shure why this is not enabled by default by now. You also want to enable the option in the camera raw plugin to open HDR files by default in HDR mode (gear icon) because by default Photoshop opens avif and jpegXL in camera raw. Tiff files that are HDR will open straight in Photoshop without going through camera raw.

[Conrad_C]

One way to think about printing HDR is that the dilemma is nothing new, it’s the same old problem of a specific medium not being able to reproduce the full original range. It’s exactly the same as in for example 15 years ago, shooting a colorful scene on pro film or a good digital camera that can capture lots of colors, and then having to edit it down and carefully preview because you know that not all of the colors can be properly represented within the very limited color gamut of a CMYK press for a magazine or book.

The difference with HDR is that the print limitation is not color gamut, it’s dynamic range. So we go through the same production practice of understanding how to properly reduce the full range down to the much smaller range that the ink and paper can reproduce.

I’m going to enjoy HDR, but understand that if I also want a great print of the same image, I will probably want to edit a copy for print separately and differently than I would for a web browser on an HDR display, like I already have been when editing down a wide gamut color image to print colors. In Lightroom Classic there are multiple ways to store a non-HDR edit with the original HDR image, including the SDR Rendition Options, snapshots, or virtual copies.