P: Beta Feature HDR Output Feedback Thread (Released)

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

With the October 10, 2023, release of Adobe’s Photography products, HDR Editing and Output is out of beta and now available as a feature across the Lightroom and Camera Raw products.

There is a great article about HDR from Eric Chan at the Adobe Blog here: https://www.adobe.com/go/hdr_explained 

This thread will be locked now but left in place for future reference. Thank you to all who participated in the testing and evolution of this feature during its beta.

Update (12.13.2022) the Beta feature (formerly Mac-only) is now available in Mac and Windows.

Camera Raw 15 15.1 introduces High Dynamic Range Output:

• the ability to view and edit HDR photos on compatible HDR displays
• the ability to save HDR photos to disk and open them in Photoshop
• the addition of (read) AVIF/JXL format files

Photos optimized for HDR displays have brighter highlights and more detailed shadows, resulting in an increased sense of realism and greater impact.

You can enable the HDR Display feature in the Technology Previews of the Camera Raw Preferences.

High Dynamic Range Output is currently a Technology Preview feature on macOS. Please provide feedback on this feature in this forum thread.

Please see: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/hdr-output.html for more information.

[JtheNinja]

Wait, is there no highlight desaturation in ACR's HDR mode at all? It would be nice to still have it as a film-like aesthetic option. Short of using a luminance range mask I'm not sure there's a good way to do in ACR generally at the moment? Obviously white isn't predefined in HDR, but allowing desaturation around a user-defined max level might be useful. Ex, some way to engineer the stuff talked about here, particular in the "S-Curves and path-to-white" section: https://chrisbrejon.com/articles/ocio-display-transforms-and-misconceptions/

Or is this intended to happen elsewhere in HDR, such as file output? Or letting the display do it?

[MadManChan2000]

In HDR mode, you can still achieve highlight desaturation if desired by using Masking. The easiest way to do this is to create a Luminance Range Mask for the highlights (best to use the Target Adjust Tool) and then tweak Saturation to taste.

[deanh99119405]

Including output sharpening when saving HDR files as AVIF seems to break the image, creating massively increased contrast. All saves fine and views fine in Chrome if saved as AVIF without Output Sharpening - Chrome matches what I see in the ACR window. I've only tried "sharpen for screen, standard" - haven't tested them all. Anyone else finding this? Using MBP 16" XDR display.

[MadManChan2000]

Yes, output sharpening + HDR + GPU mode is currently broken during Export.  Sorry about that.  We're working on a fix.  In the meantime, please either turn of output sharpening, or set Preferences / Performance / Use Graphics Processor to Custom and uncheck the "Use GPU for Open and Save" box

[deanh99119405]

Thanks for the work-arounds - much appreciated!

[Jao vdL]

AHA! That is what was happening to my images! Completely broken output. Didn't realize I had enabled output sharpening as I always do when scaling images down. They look gorgeous now in Chrome and reopening them in camera raw.

[MadManChan2000]

Yes, I was just going to ask you to post your Save dialog settings to check for that issue.  Sorry about that.

We recently posted a 15.1.1 build that fixes this issue:

https://www.adobe.com/go/acr_installer_mac
https://www.adobe.com/go/acr_installer_win

(These will also be available via the standard Adobe CC app installer  shortly after the new year.)

[Jao vdL]

Awesome Thanks!

[Jao vdL]

P.S. this is one of the most exciting features I've seen added in a long time. Bummer that it is so hard to show this off to people as there is very little support outside of ACR and Chrome. Surprisingly not even Apple's preview supports it even though it opens avif files. Looking forward to this being included beyond ACR/Photoshop in the Lightroom ecosystem.

[JtheNinja]

Has anyone else noticed some weirdness with profiles with HDR in ACR 15.2? Take this photo for example, here's what it looks like the classic SDR pipeline:

But enable HDR and you get this(example pics here are the SDR tonemapped version, but these issues show up in the full HDR view as well):

 

This is using the "camera neutral" profile for the Canon R7. This issue seems to go away if you export without GPU acceleration, that produces this:

 

Which I assume is the intended output, since it's pretty similar to Adobe Standard:

But while testing some other profiles as a workaround, I noticed that Adobe Color and friends (ex, Adobe Portrait) all exhibit a strange desaturated region in the middle of bright gradients, such as the grayish halo around the sun seen here:

Unlike the issue with the camera-matching profiles, this doesn't appear to be tied to GPU acceleration, it happens even in output files with GPU acceleration disabled and seems to be part of the profile itself.

The DNG these are based off of is here, if people want to mess around a bit(I increased the exposure to +0.1 from the original embedded setting, since it makes the gray halo in Adobe Color easier to see) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RrvICvht5vlCb5kdwgUuunJU36-Q3ps-/view?usp=share_link

[MadManChan2000]

There are some known color rendering problems with the existing color profiles when in HDR mode.  The main issue is that these profiles generally use 3D lookup tables which were originally designed for SDR content; ACR 15.2 uses an overly simplistic method to extend them for use in HDR mode, which is not working well as you've shown in your examples.  There are other colors which currently do not work at all in HDR mode (e.g., Color Grading, where overrange values are unaffected but should be).  This will be improved in the next release.

[JtheNinja]

Gotcha! Figured it might be an issue of LUTs designed for SDR mode. Thanks for the check-in!

[colind66897557]

It would be useful to have more control over how the SDR version of an HDR image is displayed— or, failing that, more information about what each tool does. It would also be useful to be able to display tones differently in the two versions. The HDR version of an image often tends to neon in the sky blues, and when corrected for looks unnatural in the SDR version when displayed.

More control over the image compression and output would also be great. For example, it would be nice to be able to specify effort or bit depth. This starts to matter in HDR images, especially JXL, owing to the expectation of higher fidelity. At the poitn in which you are mastering for HDR you are already preselecting a more judicial audience. 

[gux215]

I understand it's still in tech preview but there's no way to display the image correctly outside the Camera Raw preview window. After trying too many rounds, the only way to generate correct luminance is open the image in PS then save as Radiance .HDR format. However it shows a stong green tint. I believe it's a color profile issue(might be related to Rec.2020) but photoshop doesn't allow me to choose one when saving. Is it related to my monitor(14'' MBP) which is P3 gamut?

All the export options such as 16bit PNG/TIF are washed out. I can't view JPEG-XL in Google Chrome and Google is going to deprecate the format so I guess Adobe will remove that soon. When will exporting 10bit HEIC become an option? That could be the only format which can be displayed correctly on every HDR compatible devices.

[JtheNinja]

Export an AVIF from the Camera Raw window. It should have the same functionality as JPEG XL, except Google isn't in the process of killing support for it. It also works in Chrome out of the box, without enabling special flags. HDR AVIF is currently broken in the built-in apps in both macOS/iOS and Windows though. Both ostensibly support it, but neither displays it correctly

[colind66897557]

Google Photos supports AVIF but hasn't enabled support for the HDR expanded colour spaces and tone mapping is still pretty iffy. The same applies to animated AVIF. Rec709 is supported when encoded into AV1 but not REC 2020 unfortunatley 

[Jao vdL]

Yeah this is a real disadvantage to this technology. The only ways to correctly display the output is opening the files in Photoshop (if you have the technology preview enabled in both camera raw and in Photoshop) and Chrome (but only AVIF indeed). Apple's previewwill open these files but will not correctly display any of them. radiance seems to sort of work but indeed the colors are all off. It's not a color profile issue, Apple simply hasn't provided correct support for any of it which is indeed surprising since their devices nowadays allmost all have HDR capable screens. High bit HEIC would be a solution possibly indeed.

[JtheNinja]

Is anyone else seeing crushed shadows in camera raw on HDR displays on Windows? It doesn't occur in the output files, just when drawing the image on an HDR monitor. It appears whether HDR is enabled for the current file or not, and updating GPU drivers(RTX 3080 10GB) hasn't seemed to help.

[David Franzen at Work]

Have you tried using different settings for the "SDR content brightness" slider in Window's Settings app in System > Display > HDR? Do you see this having an effect on the "crushed shadows" effect? After changing this slider  you may need to switch back to make Photoshop/Bridge the foreground app on Windows to see a change. Can you let us know the make and model of your HDR display?

Thanks for your help,
David

[JtheNinja]

Yes, adjusting SDR content brightness does indeed change the behavior of the crushed shadows. The effect seems to go away with the slider at 100%. Of course, 100% makes the desktop overly bright and limits the HDR headroom in Camera Raw, but it does seem to fix the black level issues.

My display is a CoolerMaster GP27U.

[EagleshadowCT]

I'm glad it's not just me. I updated Photoshop and Camera Raw few days ago, and ever since then the shadows are completely crushed in the preview but not in the saved file, just as JtheNinja described. I finally figured out today that disabling HDR fixes this issue which is how I found this thread, and I'm quite sad I won't really be able to use HDR until this gets fixed.

I can also confirm that the amount of shadows that get crushed is proportional to HDR/SDR brightness balance in windows. Such setting that is supposed to only affect SDR applications obviously shouldn't be changing anything about how many nits the HDR-enabled application is outputting. And it certainly shouldn't be affecting the tonemapping of the photo. Before this update HDR worked perfectly ever since it was released.

I'm using Sony A95K as my HDR display. I can record an HDR video of this issue if that would be of any help.

[femdot]

I'm also seeing crushed shadows when that used to not be a problem. The output avif does not exhibit this issue. Opening the image in Photoshop, the shadows also look fine.

[MadManChan2000]

We have identified the problem with the "crushed shadows" symptom for HDR Output on Windows, affecting some devices. This should be fixed in our next release, coming out soon. Thanks for reporting this.

[sacb0y]

Consider using the windows display calibration app, it might break photoshop tho... some displays just don't give proper display information i think to HDR programs.

[JtheNinja]

Status update for this on ACR 15.4: the "SDR content brightness" slider now correctly affects the ACR UI without affecting the image. However, shadows are still crushed in the image itself.