Greg Benz Photography

The latest HDR trends at CES 2025

I just got back from a couple of exciting days at CES 2025. If you aren’t familiar with the Consumer Electronics Show, it is one of the largest trade shows in the world and is where new monitors and TV are often announced. So it’s a great way to get some first-hand experience with a variety of displays you won’t necessarily find at your local retailer. I’ve been attending the past couple of years to help learn more about the various HDR (high dynamic range) displays on the market.

The trends continue to look very good for the future of HDR photography. There were several notable new technologies and products on display, including much brighter OLED, wider gamuts (covering most of Rec 2020), and an expanded range of options. With these changes and recent price drops, I’ve updated my list recommended HDR monitors. page.

Before we get to the details, it’s probably helpful to provide some background. There is an old type of “HDR” (tone mapping) which is generally hated by photographers, and there is a newer “HDR” which is absolutely amazing because it’s supported by new hardware(same name, completely unrelated technologies). These new HDR displays are already widely supported in TVs, smart phones, Apple laptops, and a variety of other monitors. What makes them so special is that they are able to achieve truly greater dynamic range by increasing peak brightness while keeping blacks very dark. So while a standard display can only show 8 of the 14 stops of dynamic range from your RAW files, an HDR display can often show 12. It’s a completely different experience. And at the same time, color gamut is often much better (often covering most of P3 and a significant portion of the much larger Rec 2020 color space). This means gorgeous sunsets which are both bright and colorful, city lights that glow, etc. These images are much more natural as they no longer need to be compressed into the limited tonal range of old monitors.

These new HDR displays are enabled by one of two key technologies. OLED lights each pixel individually and therefore offers perfect blacks, but increasing brightness has been a bit challenging until recently. Mini-LED offers very bright pixels, but cannot achieve perfect blacks as multiple pixels share the same backlight. The shortcomings of both technologies have been quickly getting resolved and we are moving towards a world where both offer excellent HDR (with OLED being ideal for dark environments and mini-LED being ideal for brighter rooms).

Brighter OLED (multi-layer / stacked OLED)

Last year’s CES highlighted some transparent OLEDs. You can literally see through it anywhere the pixels are not lit. It’s gorgeous, and feels like a novelty that won’t get used this way outside of perhaps some fancy office lobby, a car windshield, or other niche applications. But a transparent OLED is incredibly useful in less obvious ways.

The 2024 M4 iPad Pro introduced a new type of OLED display which Apple calls “tandem OLED”. In a design like this, you can stack transparent OLED layers. This allows the display to get much brighter, while having similar or better lifespan (ie avoiding burn-in). The M4 Pro iPad is one of the most gorgeous consumer HDR displays I have ever seen, out of hundreds I have experienced. The benefit is immense: you get the perfect blacks of an OLED and brightness that keeps up with mini-LED. Of course, there is increased cost associated with a more complex design like this. That naturally raises questions as whether it will become widely adopted.

The 2025 LG G5 TV offers some very encouraging news as it apparently uses a 4-layer WOLED design (LG calls this “Brightness Booster Ultimate”). Official specs and details will be available later in the year, but this display apparently offers close to 4,000 nits peak brightness (LG has noted a 40% increase in full screen brightness vs last year’s G4). This design is replacing MLA (multi-lens array) to achieve high brightness. It will be very interesting to see how it performs in tests for actual peak brightness after calibration, as well as color gamut.

LG had a G5 in their booth. Unfortunately, the demo content made it hard to evaluate. It seemed that someone wanted to shows off the brightness, and didn’t care about retaining highlight detail. It is certainly bright, no question about it. I have no doubt this TV will offer both high brightness and image quality, but I was unable to appreciate it at the booth.

LG not only sells TVs, it also supplies OLED panels to other manufacturers. Apparently Panasonic uses this same new 4-layer panel, and rumors suggest that Sony’s anticipated A95L replacement this year will use it as well. While these are all premium TVs, that helps put a lot of volume behind multi-layer OLED and that’s likely to be very helpful to bring down the cost of this exciting technology. From what I’ve seen in the M4 Pro iPad, this technology would be very exciting should it be released for computer monitors.

Samsung also unveiled a brighter QD-OLED, the S95F. I did not get a chance to see it, but apparently it uses a more efficient backlight to help achieve higher peak brightness without increasing power consumption. It also uses a 2nd generation anti-glare screen.

If I had to guess, I’d expect the LG panel achieves somewhat higher peak brightness and the Samsung may excel in color gamut. But those differences will likely be small. All of these are will be excellent TVs and help push the boundaries of HDR OLED technology.

Ultra-wide gamut mini-LED (TriChroma RGB backlight)

You may not yet know Hisense, but they are a massive Chinese TV maker whose share of the global market is increasing quickly. They announced a new “RGB local dimming technology” for their new 116″ mini-LED TV (116UX). Other mini-LEDs use a single backlight and filters to achieve red, green, and blue sub-pixels. This new “TriChroma” backlight actually generates red, green, and blue light. As a result, Hisense claims they can achieve an astonishing 97% coverage of the Rec2020 colorspace. That’s a level pretty much unheard of outside of laser projectors, and the RGB backlight technology makes this claim pretty credible. Even if overstated, this appears to be quite an accomplishment.

It will be interesting to see how this technology truly performs and whether it may be scaled down to small screens. With mini-LED, there is always some degree of blooming where dark pixels leak some of the light used to illuminate neighboring pixels. With a colored backlight, there is risk of color blooming (cross-talk). This could cause some local color inaccuracy, particularly around bright, saturated objects. I inspected the demo at CES quite closely and didn’t have any concerns, but a darker environment and still content might make it more apparent if there is an issue. It seemed very promising, but I will be very interested to see if this technology can be scale down to smaller and lower cost displays. I don’t expect to see it in a computer monitor anytime soon, but it’s an interesting technology to watch.

What about micro-LED TVs?

Like last year, there were some micro-LED displays at the show. They remain absurdly expensive (around $130k for a 100″ TV). They also do not scale well for smaller displays (each pixel is a discrete set of electronics and it is hard to make it small). It’s unlikely you’ll own one in the next 5 years. At the rate that OLED and mini-LED improving, I’m not sure if these will ever see much adoption. We’d need major breakthroughs in manufacturing to compete with the cost structure of OLED. Micro-LED might be best suited for things like outdoor signs at sporting events.

Nevertheless, micro-LED is awesome to behold in person. It shows what a 10,000 nit display with perfect blacks can offer. So while these may not show up in your home, they make it clear that there will be ongoing demand for improved performance to keep driving the other technologies forward for some time.

Expanded HDR monitor options

CES is much more of a TV show, but there were several interesting new HDR computer monitors:

• ASUS PG27UCDM (preorders start Jan 21, pricing TBD – for reference, its larger 32″ sibling is $1200)
  • 27″ 4K OLED with a peak brightness of 1000 nits
  • I spent a good amount of time with this display in the ASUS booth. It shows very good color accuracy and HDR performance when set to its limited 400 nits mode. Unfortunately, all the other 1000 nit modes (including all DolbyVision modes) show very poor image quality. The hardware is clearly very capable and I was viewing a pre-production model. I would expect a firmware update could easily address this and hopefully that’s the case by the time it launches. It was impressive in the limited mode and I suspect it could offer even more with some software tweaks.
  • If you see color issues, go to the on screen menu / Image / HDR Setting and choose “DisplayHDR 400 True Black mode”
• Asus ProArt PA32QCV (price / launch date TBD)
  • 32″ 6K certified to DisplayHDR 600
  • This is the same 218 PPI I have on my Pro Display XDR and find it to be ideal for offering both high resolution and making it easy to review critical sharpness in images intended for print.
  • The ProArt line offers the ability to calibrate for HDR in the hardware, which is very beneficial.
• Dell 32 Plus S3225QC (worldwide launch May 22, $800)
  • 32″ 4K QD-OLED apparently offering HDR True Black 400 support for $800
  • While I recommend 600nits+ for OLED, this should offer ~2 stops of HDR headroom and it is notable to see companies like Dell offering displays targeting creatives (most OLEDs in this price range have typically targeted gaming, which tends to prioritize frame rates over color accuracy).
• Dell Pro 14 Premium laptop
  • This laptop will offer an optional 2.8K OLED using a tandem OLED.
  • Unlike Apple (which uses tandem ultra to achieve 1600 nits), Dell appears to be using the technology for energy savings.
  • I suspect it may peak around 400 nits from what I’ve read. Even if that is the case, this would offer real HDR benefit and is another example of expanding use of multi-layer OLED, which is likely to be beneficial for HDR cost and capability as the trend expands.
• There were several other updates to gaming monitors. This continues the trends towards higher frame rates for gamers, but also likely helps continue to bring down the cost of entry-level HDR.

What do all these TV technologies mean for photography? Where are the 4,000 nit monitors?

The brightness, dynamic range, gamut, and pricing of TVs these days is very impressive. You can already get an excellent 1150 nits OLED HDR experience in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc for under $900 with a 42″ LG C4 TV. That’s up to 4 stops of HDR headroom under controlled lighting. Of course, many people will prefer the size of a 27-32″ display and the familiarity of monitor controls. So can we expect similarly excellent performance and cost in a computer monitor soon?

The trends are clearly moving towards bright OLED / mini-LED everywhere. Most TVs, smart phones, and Apple MacBook Pro are already there. The trend is clearly towards nearly universal support of HDR with increased performance and decreased cost. It’s really a question of how quickly we’ll get there. There are some important differences between the TV and monitor markets. There is a larger market for TVs, so efficiencies of scale are important. TVs are often subsidized by advertising models which do not apply to monitors. And there is an enormous volume of TV and movie content available in HDR, where as HDR video and photos are rather limited on the web today.

At the same time, there are many reasons to be excited for the monitor market. Apple has already converted nearly all of their displays to HDR, often with very high specifications. It’s clearly possible and largely a matter of costs and consumer demand. Much of this investment in TVs should benefit computers directly or indirectly. And perhaps most importantly, the recent updates in the HDR photography ecosystem for widespread support of editing, ISO standards for sharing, and social media support will spur demand from creatives – who in turn will create content that helps spur demand from other consumers who wish to see these gorgeous images and video.

When you consider the overall trends for HDR in 2024 (such as BenQ launching its first consumer HDR monitor), there is significant momentum in the market. We are likely at a tipping point in 2025 where consumer HDR will begin to accelerate.

Which HDR monitor should you get? See my recommended HDR monitors for details on the best options today and the specs that matter most.

There were so many product and technology announcements, I likely missed something notable. And some of the best tech at the show was behind closed doors and not available to general attendees. If you heard other CES news you think may be relevant to the future of HDR displays for photography, please comment below.

The best of HDR photography in 2024

Have you ever felt that a scene with gorgeous light looks flat in your photo? That’s probably because most displays can’t do justice to the incredible dynamic range your camera captured. But now, with the latest HDR display technology, your photos can truly shine — exactly the way you saw them in real life.

Photos displayed on a modern HDR (high dynamic range) display allows us to show the full dynamic range of our RAW files. While our cameras typically capture 14 stops or more of dynamic range, older (standard / SDR) displays can only handle about 8. That forces compromises that drain the color from sunsets, make dynamic light less vibrant than real life, and increase the complexity of editing. With HDR displays, you can finally see your photos in their full glory — vibrant colors, rich contrast, and details in both the highlights and shadows that are lost on standard screens.

To be clear, I’m referring to “new” HDR display technologies like mini-LED and OLED which allow better photography via better hardware. These two are often confused, but they’re completely unrelated. If you’re unsure, see the “new” vs “old” HDR comparison to see why the new “HDR” is the most biggest leap for digital photography in decades.

HDR display has been around for quite a while. It was first introduced for movies and it’s now quite difficult to find a TV or movie which does not support some HDR standard like HDR10 or DolbyVision. That was a natural starting point. Hollywood movies are created by a relatively small number of technical experts working with large budgets. And because movies are more commonly watched in dark environments, they worked well even with the first few generations of OLED (which did not get very bright).

Until recently, HDR photography presented a much greater set of challenges. It requires an editing experience simple enough for amateurs, brighter screens for use in a much wider range of environments, and new standards to help share mixed SDR and HDR content across a much more complex set of devices and software. While there is certainly important work ahead, enormous progress has been made in the past in the past couple years.

We are now at a point where HDR photography is very useful and can be shared with a wide audience thanks to some important recent developments. And we are getting close to the point growth will accelerate as adoption expands from innovators to the early adopters who start to take practical advantage of HDR to make their photography stand out online. So I thought it would help to recap some important developments in 2024 which set the stage for HDR photography to start to take off in 2025.

HDR Hardware: It’s Everywhere — You Just Didn’t Know It Yet

There is a common misperception that HDR support is rare. The reality is that a very large number of people already own one or more HDR-capable displays. It just seems rare because we haven’t had the software, distribution channels, and content to appreciate the hardware. Software has improved significantly, distribution options are quickly expanding, and this will naturally lead to more and more content.

HDR is supported on the majority of smart phones sold since late 2020. This means that most people on mobile-first sites like Instagram have great HDR support while viewing your images.

HDR is nearly universally supported in TVs (support was first added in 2016). Even very cheap big screens tend to support HDR (often noted as HDR10, HLG, or DolbyVision). Unless your TV is very old, it most likely supports HDR and can be a great way to share photos at home.

Most Apple laptops and displays sold since 2018 support HDR. The M1+ MacBook Pro, M4 iPad Pro, and iPhone 14 and later offering truly stunning levels of HDR capability (“XDR” branded displays).

Given this, a large number of people already own 2-3 HDR displays and don’t even know it!

The only place where HDR hardware isn’t already the majority are in PC laptops and external monitors. But there are already many options for both and support is quickly growing. And you can easily use a 42″ TV as a great HDR monitor for as little as ~$600 new. See my list of recommended HDR monitors if you’re looking to upgrade your setup.

We’re at a pivotal moment: HDR photography isn’t just for tech enthusiasts anymore. With major platforms like Instagram and Threads embracing HDR, and widespread HDR support on smartphones, laptops, and TVs, 2025 will be the year that HDR photos go mainstream. If you want your work to stand out, now is the time to dive in.

The best of HDR photography in 2024

There are have been numerous developments in the past ~18 months which give photographers the opportunity to make serious use of HDR. The collective impact of these updates is that we now have excellent support to edit and export HDR images which can be viewed as HDR by a large audience on Instagram and can be safely shared anywhere (even on devices lacking HDR support. We also have the ability to share these images with a very large audience (particularly on Instagram, where ).

Notable HDR photography improvements in the past year include:

• Instagram and Threads offer excellent support for sharing HDR photos
  • This allows you to share HDR with a very large audience (the majority of viewers have great HDR support on their smart phone)
  • See this tutorial for details on how to export and upload HDR photos to both platforms.
  • See my Instagram and Threads profile for SDR vs HDR example posts.
• Widespread support for encoding and viewing JPG “gain maps”
  • Gain maps are the key technology which allow your photos to look great on any display, regardless of whether it actually supports HDR or not.
  • Before we could share gain maps, an image processed for HDR meant older SDR displays may not look ideal (or vary from browser to browser).
• Web Sharp Pro v6 added significant new capabilities for sharing HDR photos
  • (I haven’t even announced v6 yet, but you can get started now by clicking the “tutorials” button in the v6 panel and reviewing the HDR sections – more information coming soon!)
  • Supports exports optimized for the specific encoding required for HDR photos on Instagram and Threads (see this tutorial).
  • Full control of the base SDR image when exporting a JPG with a gain map. This offers a significantly better experience on any SDR or limited-HDR display.
  • Support for HDR photo slideshows on a TV. Go to the top-right (four bars) flyout menu and choose the option to “create HTML slideshow”. Then just connect your computer over HDMI to a TV to show the images.
• The entire Adobe suit of software includes extensive support for HDR editing and export.
  • all versions of Lightroom (Classic, Desktop, iOS, Android, and web) for MacOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, and Android (for Pixel phones)
  • Adobe Camera RAW for both Windows and MacOS
  • Photoshop for both Windows and MacOS (under a tech preview “precise color management for HDR display”).
• PS 2025 updated roughly twenty tools for 32-bit HDR support (spot healing, remove, etc) to allow extensive support for advanced HDR editing.
• Affinity Photo and Pixelmator also offer good HDR support
• Halide announced support for HDR capture in their upcoming mark III update
• Significant improvements in the pricing and availability of HDR displays
  • Xiaomi now sells a 1000-nit 27″ HDR for ~$350.
  • ASUS launched a new flagship 1600-nits 31″ mini-LED monitor with hardware calibration and 4x the zone count of the Pro Display XDR (at half the price).
  • Apple launched a ground-breaking 1600-nits “tandem OLED” in the M4 iPad Pro. This offers one of the best OLED experiences available and up to 4 stops of headroom in a mobile device.
  • MacOS v15 (Sequoia) added an HDR brightness slider. This makes it very easy to use an 3rd-party monitor or 42″ TV for a great HDR experience, thus greatly expanding the range and affordability of options for Apple users.
  • A quickly growing number of PC laptops are supporting HDR with 600 nit OLEDs
  • Nearly all Apple displays offer HDR now (only the budget iPhone SE and lower tier iPads lack HDR now)
• Apple now enables up to 1000 nits SDR in the M4 MacBook Pro to enable up to 1000-nits SDR. By leveraging their HDR capabilities in this way, this makes it much easier to use their laptops for every day use in bright environments (such as when using your laptop outdoors or near bright windows).
• Initial support for encoding AVIF gain maps
  • Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom add gain maps to HDR AVIF when “maximize compatibility” is enabled (JXL and TIF also support gain map encoding, but they will have limited impact for a while).
  • Chrome and related browsers offer gain map decoding support under a developer flag (chrome://flags/#avif-gainmap-hdr-images)
  • AVIF is close to being ready for general use and will be a vast improvement over JPG (the images are higher quality and ~30% smaller). All modern browsers support SDR decoding of AVIF, with 95% of web visitors having support (the remaining 5% gap come from people using outdated browsers and we should soon get to a point where the gap is small enough to use AVIF – especially in related applications)

Will HDR photography start to go mainstream in 2025?

There are a number of improvements coming for HDR which should help early adopters more easily share HDR and help their images stand out online.

In 2025, we can expect:

• Much more widespread support for sharing HDR
  • Given how widespread and quickly growing HDR displays already are, the biggest barrier now is in having easy ways to share HDR images online. Sharing HDR on your own website, Instagram, or Threads is already great, and ongoing efforts should help significantly expand your options share your beautiful HDR images.
  • The ISO 21496-1 standard should help greatly accelerate support as it allows developers to focus efforts on a single standard (instead of the current mix of Adobe, Android, and Apple encodings).
  • ISO encoding is already supported in
    • Web Sharp Pro v6
    • Apple support for Photos, native camera app, iMessage, Quick Look, Preview, and developer APIs under MacOS / iOS / iPadOS (everything but TvOS)
    • Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Opera for MacOS / Windows / Android
  • ISO support should also help eliminate device-specific constraints for uploading or viewing images (such as problems uploading a valid gain map from an iPhone to Instagram)
  • The open-source libultrahdr Google library now offers full support for transcoding (including resize, compress, crop, and mirror) of JPG gain maps. This should allow many common and critical libraries to add support (ImageMagick has already integrated it).
  • The WordPress media library should be able to add support for HDR JPG in hosting environments which support ImageMagick (pending additional efforts to update the PHP end of things – and ideally the default GD library would get support as well to support all hosting environments).
  • Growing awareness and demand should also help further accelerate existing trends towards more options and greater simplicity.
• Better selection and pricing of HDR displays for PC laptops and external monitors
  • There is a clear trend towards more support and lower pricing. At some point, we should hit a tipping point where things move more rapidly, though it is hard to say how fast things might accelerate in 2025.
  • We may get an early look in a couple weeks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Many HDR improvements were announced there last year, and there are many rumors of potentially large breakthroughs for OLED TVs (indicating we may start to see OLED monitors support up to 4000 nits).
• The potential to start sharing HDR images encoded as AVIF with a gain map
  • This format offers higher quality (for both HDR and SDR) as well as much smaller images (about 30% smaller on average).
  • Initial support for browsing and decoding is already available. This should be quite common by late 2025.
  • Support for SDR AVIF is at 95% and growing, so these images should also be relatively safe to share by late 2025.
  • By end of 2025 or early 2026, we should be in good shape to share HDR AVIF safely and with the confidence that the HDR support is close to or the same as what we’ll have for JPG at that point (beyond upgrading browsers to ensure safe SDR browsing with AVIF, mobile operating systems are likely the gating factor for HDR AVIF gain maps since desktop browsers already have support).
• There will certainly be many more HDR improvements in the coming year. The pace and breadth of investment has been enormous and we can expect significant improvements. However, there is limited public information on product roadmaps for HDR support. So rather than offering speculation, I’ll simply outline which additional capabilities would be most beneficial for the HDR community…

What else do we need for HDR photography?

Webkit / Safari support for HDR images:

No one has invested more into providing great HDR hardware than Apple, so it is rather surprising that you need to use 3rd-party browsers to take advantage of it. Many MacOS users (and the in-store demo computers) use Safari, which lacks HDR. And on iOS / iPadOS, all browsers (even Chrome) lack HDR support as they are required to use WebKit. Hopefully, we will see some good news at WWDC in June or earlier. It’s great that we can use apps like Instagram, Thread, Lightroom, and Pixelmator, but the time has come to fully unlock the untapped potential of the iPhone and iPad for HDR photos in the browser.

Greater support for uploading HDR to the web (ie transcoding support to preserve gain maps):

The libraries noted above are an excellent start, but there are are likely other important open-source or proprietary libraries which will need updates or some degree of integration. In addition, 3rd-party apps will often need updates to provide support outside of web browsers. Be sure to contact your favorite web services (Reddit, Flicker, Discord, Facebook, SquareSpace, Wix, etc) and let them know you would like to share HDR JGP gain maps on their platform. These investments will be largely driven by customer demand.

HDR support for profiling a monitor:

There is no currently no ICC standard for profiling a monitor in HDR mode (if you enable a custom profile, HDR content will clip to SDR). There are several options now for accurate color including: Apple displays (which are very accurate from the factory), ASUS ProArt monitors (which support calibration in the hardware), and using a TV as a monitor (as nearly all TVs support HDR and calibration in the hardware, and new TVs are often very accurate when set to the right modes). You can also switch the monitor between SDR (with support for profiling) and unprofiled HDR (Windows supports this by default and MacOS users can do it most easily using BetterDisplay). However, this still means many low cost HDR monitors (which are often aimed at gamers) will not show HDR as accurately as possible. A standard for profiling any HDR monitor would offer tremendous simplicity and improved image quality for a large range of monitors (especially lower-cost monitors).

More support for showing HDR photos on a TV:

The vast majority of people have a huge HDR screen sitting right in their living room. That TV is perfect for sharing your photos with friends and family in your home.

Web Sharp Pro v6 now includes an option (via top-right flyout menu) to create a HTML slideshow you can show when connecting your computer / phone / iPad to your TV over HDMI. That’s a great, but it would be even better to have support with wireless options like AirPlay, AppeTV, or ChromeCast.

Solutions for the “HDR is too bright” concern:

There is a relatively small but vocal group of users who complain that HDR video and photos are too bright on their phones. It’s not quite a concern I have personally, but I completely understand where they are coming from. It’s a real concern in a very specific use case: viewing in a very dark environment (typically someone scrolling social media on their phone at night in bed).

In response to this, Samsung has created a way to completely disable HDR in OneUI7. This is a terrible design, and quite frankly lazy engineering. I have no problem with offering this option, as user choice is always important. But it is a bad solution for the vast majority of users who are concerned with bright HDR. No one is complaining that their display is too bright when they use outdoors or when they set the brightness slider high. Turning HDR off all the time would prevent getting the benefit where possible, and hidden settings like this are likely to cause user confusion.

A much better solution would simply be to limit or disable HDR headroom when (a) the ambient light sensor detects the phone is in a very dark environment and (b) the user has set the brightness slider to a low level. With that approach, you would avoid the problem and still be able to easily enjoy the benefit of HDR as much as possible. With testing to ensure the limits are set correctly, this could probably even be enabled as a default behavior. And while an option to force HDR off could still be offered in addition, I expect there would be almost no need for it.

I believe such a feature to limit headroom when viewing with low brightness in a dark environment should be offered in all major operating systems (iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows, etc). A feature like this needs to be done at the operating system level for a number of reasons. Having each app do this would create a confusing and cumbersome user interface, variability across apps, require a lot of wasteful repeat work by developers, and privacy controls probably require it (as 3rd-party apps don’t have access to ambient light or display brightness info to prevent user “fingerprinting”). In scenarios where the operating system lacks ambient light info (such as using a desktop with an external monitor lacking a web cam), the headroom could be limited simply when brightness is at or near the absolute minimum.

Ready to make your photos pop like never before? How to get started with HDR now:

It’s never been easier to work with HDR photos and you probably already have everything you need to get started! Here’s a quick list of resources:

• Most photographers I know already own 1-3 HDR displays and don’t even know it. If you bought a TV, Apple laptop or smart phone in the past 4 years, it very likely supports HDR (there are many other options, those are just some of the most common).
• See my HDR tests and overview to learn more and confirm what you already have.
• Adobe Lightroom supports nearly all of these devices (Android support is for Pixel Pro at this time).
• See my HDR e-book for tips on using your TV as an HDR monitor.

If you’re considering investing in a great display, see my reviews of the MacBook Pro or external HDR monitors.

How to share HDR photos on Instagram or Threads

Many of you have asked how you can share HDR photos like I do on my Instagram (IG) or Threads posts. The vast majority of people viewing IG will see your images on HDR-capable display because most people view IG on smart phones, and most phones since 2020 have great HDR displays. This gives you a way to share much more life-like images which show the full color and dynamic range from your RAW files. In this tutorial, you’ll learn the exact workflow using Web Sharp Pro (WSP) to get consistently great results on IG.

At the same time, you may or may not have an HDR computer monitor. If you use an Apple computer, it is very likely you have support (the M1 and later MacBook Pros have outstanding HDR displays). And there are many other great HDR monitors (see my recommendations), or you can use most TVs for a great HDR monitor. But even if that isn’t your scenario, you can create enhanced HDR images for IG even if you do not have an HDR monitor. To demonstrate that, this HDR export was created and exported from a computer using a standard monitor with no HDR support.

There are many potential ways to use WSP to prepare images for HDR display on IG. You can work from an SDR image, from an HDR image, or even provide your own SDR and HDR pair (you can completely customize the gain map). I’ll share more on these workflows in the near future (the current version is functionally a full “v6” preview and I’ll be releasing many more tutorials soon now that all the key features are ready).

Today, we’ll just cover the workflow starting from an SDR image. This workflow which is great if you want to both print and support HDR display, work from images already edited for SDR, or just prefer SDR editing workflows. This makes it a simple but powerful way to enhance your images in just a few seconds.

Workflow to get consistent HDR results on IG:

The workflow for consistently great HDR photos on IG is:

1. Export the image through WSP
   • Select any of the included “Instagram” templates in WSP. Not only does this ensure the correct size / cropping, it also enables encoding specifically required for HDR support on IG (there are many valid HDR encodings which will not show as HDR on IG, so this is very important).
   • Settings / File / HDR Format should be set to “JPG (w/gain map)“. *
   • If your image is not already an HDR (32-bit) image, enable Settings / File / “enhance SDR to HDR“.
   • If you are enhancing an SDR, it is ideal to also enable Settings / File / “leave image open”. This allows you to customize the HDR results by painting on the layer mask (or adjusting the top group’s opacity) before clicking the green “SAVE” button in WSP to complete the export.
   • If you wish to demonstrate the HDR benefit, you may optionally enable the option to add SDR / HDR labels.
2. Upload the exported JPG via the IG website via computer browser
   • You may alternatively upload from an Android phone, but DO NOT upload via an iPhone. You can safely view HDR on iPhone, but images uploaded on an iPhone currently get transcoded to a low quality image. These sort of device-specific behaviors are likely to go away as the ISO gain map format is widely adopted (at the moment we have a mix of standards, which creates these sort of issues at times).
   • Click Create / Post, when drag and drop the images you exported from WSP. You may upload multiple images in the same post (I do this for split HDR panoramas).
   • Note that you will likely not see HDR in the preview window, but the result after upload will show as HDR if you use a supporting browser.
   • In the first IG upload preview, click the icon at bottom left and change from the default 1:1 crop to “original“. This is mandatory on every new upload, as the cropping does not support HDR at this time.

As long as you take care to follow these key steps (the bold items), you will have an HDR result on IG. See the troubleshooting steps below if you have any questions.

* The JPG (w/gain map) format is supported on Windows and Apple Silicon. If you have an old Intel Mac (anything before M1), you can export a gain map using the “via ACR” workflow for sharing in general, but you likely will not see HDR results if you upload that image format to IG. You may alternatively upload a simple AVIF from some devices and will see HDR, but I strongly recommend you avoid that option. When you upload an image without a gain map, the SDR base image will be auto-generated and the results are generally of low quality. This will affect the quality of experience on old devices, when viewing outdoors or under low power mode, etc.

Workflow to get consistent HDR results on Threads:

You can also share HDR on Threads, but devices supported for uploading are very different. iPhone and Pixel work for uploading. But computers do NOT work, and neither does the Samsung S24 (so not all Android are the same and I can only confirm that the Pixel 8 Pro will upload).

As with IG, all HDR capable devices (including computers and S24) appear to show HDR once uploaded on a supporting device.

The workflow is generally very similar to the IG workflow above. Just be sure to choose one of the included “Threads” templates.

==> IMPORTANT: To see successful HDR posts, you will either need WSP v6 (not yet available) or can set up a template as noted below.

• Like IG, Threads needs very specific encoding for success, so I need to submit an update to Adobe to enable this in my templates.
• However, you may get it to work with WSP v5.9.14 by manually creating your own template (under settings / quick export editor). You must include the name “Instagram” in the template (this is not a typo, the purpose is to trick WSP into using the required encoding used by both Instagram and Threads). I recommend you just set a fixed width of 2160 (just leave the height blank).

Troubleshooting:

If you are able to see HDR on any device, the upload was successful. The following are good ways to confirm your upload worked (you must have HDR support on the device to test this however):

• Use WSP’s option to add labels and see if the “HDR” label shows in the post. Note that IG and Threads in some cases convert the gain map to an HDR and tone map down. So you may see true HDR, but if you can read the “HDR” label created by WSP then the upload was definitely accepted as an HDR.
• Open the same post in a browser that supports HDR (Chrome) and in one that does not (FireFox or Safari).

There are various potential scenarios where a specific device may not have HDR support.

You may not see HDR on your smart phone if any of the following apply:

• You are using an Android device and got to the image from a link. This appears to be a bug in the Android app. Just navigate to the same image manually in the app and you should see HDR.
• the phone is old or otherwise lacks HDR support. Most phones since late 2020 have support. You’ll need iOS 17+ or Android 14+.
• viewing outside (the iPhone ambient light sensor may disable HDR outdoors to prioritize SDR content).
• low power mode.
• using the iOS IG app and have disabled HDR (turn off settings / “disable display of HDR media” – then force quit and restart the app).
• using any web browser on iOS. WebKit does not currently support HDR photos (and this is used by all iOS browsers – not just Safari), so use the iOS IG app.
• using iOS and Settings / Accessibility / “reduce white point” is enabled.
• there are occasional reports of a bug which may be resolve by restarting a phone.

You may not see HDR on a computer if the display, operating system, or browser does not support HDR. See these HDR tests and the troubleshooting on that same page for computer monitors. An HDR-capable computer is not required to create or upload HDR images to IG, but it is certainly ideal if possible.