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Question

HDR Export Troubles

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
August 16, 2024
3 replies
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Hi there,

I'm having trouble exporting my HDR photos. I'm on Windows 11. I have two monitors, one SDR monitor, and an HDR-600 certified monitor, 10bit output from my RTX3070ti.
I have HDR in windows enabled with the SDR brightness limittted to 50%. Monitor brightness itself is of course at 100%.
Editing the photos is great, really makes em pop, and also makes me wish I had an HDR-1400 monitor 😛
However, the greatness unfortunately stops when I try to export the darn things.

JXL is unable to be opened on any program I could find, except for Irfanview, but it seems to just discard the HDRness, and convert it to a washed out 8bit mess.
JPG+gain opens like a normal jpg everywhere, not using the gain map. It's just the 'preview for SDR' image. Exception is Chrome, though it still doesn't come out looking like what I saw in the editor.
AVIF doesn't have thumbnails, can't be opened by anything except Chrome, where it again looks different to what I did in Lightroom itself.
TIFF just opens as an SDR image.
PNG, same as TIFF.

What colorspace I use doesn't seem to matter much, as it only screws up the image in other tones, they remain washed out.

Just trying to show what I mean itself is extremely frustrating, as I run into many of the same issues. I can't take a screenshot, as it just gets blown out, I can't take an HDR screenshot, as it just gets re-encoded and changes. Best thing I can do is literally point my phone's camera at the screen and record that way.. .. but of course that is also not exactly optimal. I tried recording some, but the quality is just too poor to be of any help here.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

I would like to be able to have some app in which I can just.. scroll through the photos, view them fullscreen, without having to open them individually each time, the way they appeared in my lightroom classic develop mode.
I get that in some photos I go beyond what my monitor can display, going into +3 or +4 stops of dynamic range. But given my monitor is also what I'm attempting to view it on, shouldn't that not matter? Output oughta be what I saw in develop, I'd think.

Windows

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

How are you calibrating your display brightness? The correct setting for SDR brightness is zero % with the monitor brightness calibrated to a standard value for top brightness in SDR like around 120 cd/m2. The HDR ranges should go above that but SDR white should be basically like a white sheet of paper in the same room. That will feel like dull gray if you have any HDR content displayed which is just your brain fooling you.

Be EXTREMELY careful with editing for HDR. Almost nobody can actually see it correctly. Only a few web services support it and only after jumping through enormous hoops. Only if you control your own web server and make sure your viewers have a correctly done HDR capable setup or HDR capable devices that can show it (not a single iOS device can display this correctly through a web browser, only a few androids can do it in Chrome) should you do this. There really is very little support out there and it is still very much the wild west. Greg Benz has some good resources: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr/ but caution is very much advised that only a tiny percentage of your typical audience will be able to see it correctly.

M

maxm54353747Author

Known Participant

My typical audience is me and whomever I show stuff to on my computer haha. Though, I would like to be able to upload it to Flickr, too.

I had downloaded the windows HDR calibration tool, not super advanced, showed some grids/shapes and asked me to adjust brightness etc till they were either barely or not visible.
A white sheet of paper in the same room seems like terrible comparison as the room can have a bazillion different lighting conditions. At night, it would be lit by the lamps in my house with warm light, while at day it would be lit with far, far brighter cooler sunlight. The 0% SDR slider makes SDR content look extremely dull, and would probably pose problems at day when sunlight is involved.
Having the slider be at 0 feels like when the magical genie just makes everyone in the world piss-poor, when you wish to be the richest person on Earth.
I don't want to make my SDR content look like dull doodoo, I want the HDR content to pop out above it.
50% SDR looks fine/natural, or whatever you want to call it, whle HDR still clearly pops beyond that.
If I had a brighter display, HDR1000, or 1400, I would probably set it to lower than 50%, but I don't.

And yeah, I'd seen Greg's videos, but I couldn't find an answer to my specific issue

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

This really sounds like a bug. On my machine (a M1 Max) avif exports are absolutely identical to images inside Lightroom Classic. As said, hdr is very much still the Wild West. Mac OS has probably by far the best support but even there there are maddeningly annoying inconsistencies such as avif not working correctly in the standard image viewer preview but only working right in chrome and in photos but not in Apple's own browser. None of this is really ready for general use even though Adobe has done a great job pushing this stuff forward. Microsoft and Apple still need to get their act together.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

Install the AV1 Video Extension from the MS Store. Also, AVIF is natively supported on most current Apple devices.

johnrellis

Legend

I just tested with HDRs exported from my LR 13.5 / Mac OS 13.5 displayed on my Macbook Pro 2023 16" Retina:

Google Chrome: Correctly displays .avif and .jpg but won't open .jxl.

Microsoft Edge: Correctly displays .avif and .jpg but won't open .jxl.

Mac Photos: Correctly displays .avif and .jxl but displays .jpg in SDR.

Mac Preview: Displays .jpg and .avif in SDR but won't open .jxl.

johnrellis

Legend

Not many apps are capable yet of displaying HDR images. Adobe's blog post from last October:

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

mentions Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera. I haven't seen an updated authoritative list.

I'm wondering if the difference you see between LR Develop and Chrome is due to your 600-nit display. Adobe recommends at least 1000 nits, and perhaps the different code in Chrome and LR cause the display to handle the high end of the range differently. Just a guess not informed by much knowledge.

Perhaps you could share a sample raw image with edits here, and then some of us can see if we're getting the same discrepancy on other HDR displays. In Library, select the image and do Metadata > Save Metadata To File. Then upload the raw file and its .xmp sidecar to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar and post the sharing link here.

M

maxm54353747Author

Known Participant

I was thinking something like that too, but I'm not sure.
I do have additional info though, a bit of an experiment that I just ran. Windows has this slider to determine how bright SDR contest should look (this screenshot is taken with the window on my SDR monitor). At 0%, like here, my monitor is too dark, I think. I prefer it at 50%.

However.. I just found out that this setting affects how much Lightroom thinks my monitor is capable of displaying. Look at the HDR histograms here:

Slider at 0%, histogram says I have 3 extra stops

Slider at 50%, bit over 1 stop of HDR

Slider at 100%, basically no HDR

I mean.. I guess? Though I don't know how this maps to a monitor that flat out is brighter than mine.
What however almost certainly is not good, though, is that the HDR view I see ALSO GETS BRIGHTER, when I brighten the slider. Even the max-brightness, the highlights like the sun, get brighter, physically brighter.
I will say I updated Windows this morning, as I saw there were 'improvements' to the way Windows handles HDR. I hoped it might fix my issues, but nope. I don't recall seeing this latest issue before, so it seems the update only made it worse.

johnrellis

Legend

Maybe the difference between Chrome and LR is that they are treating that Windows setting differently. If you share a sample photo as described above, we can test whether it displays correctly on other platforms and displays.

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