Lightroom Classic HDR Export Issues on MacBook Pro M3 Max

[RadamBrown]

Help! I'm having issues with my Lightroom Classic displaying amazingly edited photos in the Develop screen, but when I go to export them, they're basically looking like SDR. I'm on a newer MacBook Pro M3 Max, my Display is at 1728 x 1117 (Default), Preset Apple XDR Display (P3-1600 nits), Refresh rate of ProMotion, brightness is all the way up, Auto adjust brightness is on, and True Tone is on (in case any of this helps). I'm clicking on the export option for HDR Output, Color Space HDR sRGB (Rec. 709), JPEG with Quality 100. I also turned on the LRC Preferences Presets to Enable HDR editing. One thing that I also did that may or may not make any difference is I brought them into Photoshop to use the remove tool and then saved and it goes back into LRC.

Thanks for any input as I'm at a loss and have been searching and searching for solutions to no avail. If using HDR is not a generally accessible format out there, then I'm unsure how beneficial this option is to help a few out when we love the look of HDR but can't export them in a user-friendly way for people to view our work...unless of course it's my settings or something that I can adjust. Thank you any help since I'm on a timeline and need to get these photos over to the client and would hate to have to edit them as SDR knowing how well they look in HDR (plus the extra time it'll take). Here's some screenshots to assist just in case...the one from my iPhone doesn't do it justice, but you get the point and can see the color differences mostly from that.

[John R Ellis]

Rather than JPEG, use AVIF or JPEG XL with a wider color space (Display P3, Prophoto, Rec 2020).

You don't say how you are viewing the exported photos, but only a few apps on Mac can display them properly, including Mac Photos, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge.  Mac Preview does not display them properly yet.

See here for more details on displaying HDR images:

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained#let-me-show-it-to-the-world 

(and read the rest of that article for the most authoritative information about working with HDR in LR).

[RadamBrown]

I was just viewing them in Mac Finder and Preview. I tried the other options you mentioned and they actually looked mostly worse (in Finder and Preview). So if most people can't even see what the images really look like, what's the point of having HDR for now? Or once the HDR images are uploaded onto Google Chrome for instance (like real estate photos for a client's listing), then people can see what they really look like? Thanks, and I already read that blog and it didn't really help with the issue, just good info about HDR.

[John R Ellis]

"I already read that blog and it didn't really help with the issue,"

The article is specific about how to view HDR images and the current state of the industry with respect to HDR:

"Being an older format, JPEG has many limitations (such as 8 bits per channel) that make it inadequate for storing high-quality HDR photos. Newer formats such as AVIF and JPEG XL offer higher quality at reduced file sizes, making them great choices for HDR photos. For this reason, we’ve added import and export support in Lightroom and Camera Raw for both AVIF and JPEG XL."

"The drawback of these newer formats is that they aren’t yet universally supported. Industry adoption is growing, but it will take time for all of your favorite apps and devices to read AVIF and JPEG XL photos and display them as HDR (instead of automatically tone mapping them to SDR, as is often done today). For now, this means that some apps and platforms will be able to show your HDR photos, but others cannot. I expect this situation to improve over the next couple of years." [Emphasis added]

...

"To see the photos in this post in High Dynamic Range, I recommend that you use a macOS or Windows system with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge version 116 or later and a High Dynamic Range display that supports 1000 nits or brighter. Note that other browsers and platforms may not display the photos on this page in HDR. Recommended displays include Apple XDR displays, such as a MacBook Pro with an XDR display (2021 or later), and any display VESA-certified as DisplayHDR 1000 or DisplayHDR 1400."

...

"For example, macOS 14 and iOS 17 have better HDR support in Apple Photos than previous versions. Android 14 has better HDR support than Android 13. Google Chrome 116 or later can display AVIF files in HDR — this makes it possible to build and share high-quality HDR web galleries."

"Lightroom web albums are also a great way to share HDR photos online. The web albums internally use the AVIF format, so your audience will need to use a browser that supports HDR display of AVIF files. At the time of this writing, Chrome, Brave, and Opera are all good choices."

So if you want to share with others, you could upload the photos into Lightroom Web and share the URL. But to see the HDR, they would need to use Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Brave on an HDR display.

Here's a sample HDR in Lightroom Web that, when viewed in Chrome or Edge on Mac OS 14.4.1 on a Macbook Pro (Retina XDR Display), looks the same as in Lightroom Classic Develop:

https://lightroom.adobe.com/shares/05dec9d9cc8b44878f27bad31b1c6f89 

[RadamBrown]

So by Chrome, does that just mean generally looking at the images once they're loaded onto a website, or do the client need to access a special site to view them properly as HDR? I guess I need to figure out if it's too much work for a client to look at photos as HDR, then it's not worth editing in HDR until it's more user-friendly for them to do so. Thanks for the input.

[Jao vdL]

You indeed have to be very careful with this. Very few people can see the HDR on their devices except if they follow precise instructions. There are ways to embed both a sdr version and a hdr version in jpeg files which is a good alternative but not trivial to accomplish or use the SDR preview tools available in Lightroom to make sure if the file is seen on a SDR only system, it at least shows something you created. However, the SDR created this way is typically inferior to just editing SDR only. Therefore until Apple, Microsoft, and google get their act together, you should only do HDR if you have full control over the imaging chain all the way to the person viewing it. You will get sub par results otherwise.

It's quite amazing indeed on a capable machine (I have a M1 Max with XDR display and it is absolutely glorious) but fraught with major caveats if you send out your files for others to view. Even Adobe has only integrated it into a few pieces of software (really only Lightroom and camera raw). Photoshop on Windows can't even deal with these outside of camera raw! On Macs you at least can turn on the tech preview option and work with HDR files in Photoshop itself. Premiere doesn't like these files at all, etc. etc. It's really all in its infancy still which is quite disappointing.

[John R Ellis]

"So by Chrome, does that just mean generally looking at the images once they're loaded onto a website, or do the client need to access a special site to view them properly as HDR?"

It will depend on whether the web site knows how to serve AVIF images. Of the services I use, Zenfolio considers them as "raw" and won't let you add them to Zenfolio albums; and Flickr thinks they're videos and won't display them properly.

But even if the web site will serve AVIF images, if a user views them with a non-HDR-aware browser or on a non-HDR display, the results could be disappointing -- you may not be happy with how the browser and operating system map the HDR tones to SDR tones.

Lightroom Web appears to be smarter. When you edit an HDR image in Lightroom, you can edit the Preview For SDR Display settings to provide a more pleasing mapping from HDR tones to SDR tones (see the article for details). When you upload that image to Lightroom Web, it will serve the HDR version if the browser and display support HDR, otherwise it will serve the SDR version.

[RadamBrown]

Makes sense...sounds like it just isn't worth it quite yet to spend the time editing and hoping the HDR will look the same for others that probably won't have the ability to view them in HDR to begin with unfortunately...but I sure love how they turn out in HDR! Thanks for your time and input.

[RadamBrown]

Found this helpful insight for "gain maps" and am hoping it helps some with exporting so that both SDR and HDR are possible in one exported file, depending on the other parties and what they're viewing it on. This shows you the simple steps and a lot of background and tech behind being able to control it yourself vs. depend on a "so-so" results with the automatic tone mapping inside Adobe LRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUGTBCT32I&t=10s and this was also helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V1edlS0O5k&t=15s