Greg Benz Photography

The best of HDR photography in 2024

December 30, 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

December 16, 2024

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:

  • 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.

Great deals for Black Friday 2024

November 22, 2024

There are some great deals this week for Black Friday on some of my favorite tools for photography, including:

  • Up to $300 off the M4 MBP:
  • Up to $600 off the M3 MBP:
  • $400 off the ASUS PA32UCXR
    • This is one of the best HDR monitors on the market, offering: 4 stops of more dynamic range than a standard monitor, hardware calibration, support for MacOS and Windows, and compares very favorably with displays costing twice as much.
    • See my full review for details.
  • >50% off the Topaz Everything bundle
    • This includes Gigapixel, Sharpen AI, Denoise AI, and more.
    • See my Gigapixel tutorial.
  • Up to 30% off Sandisk Extreme 1-4TB PRO SSD.
    • This portable drive is incredibly small (easily fits in your pocket) and incredibly fast. This is a perfect way to add more storage to your laptop or help stay backed up when traveling. I’ve owned several of these over the years.

 

And you can save 25% off all my software and courses (Lumenzia, Web Shar Pro, my new Focus Stacking course, etc) with discount code BF2024 (through Dec 2). You can also use that code with the bundles to stack multiple discounts (get the Ultimate 6-Course bundle for $266 off all my courses and get a 7th bonus course!).

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. See my ethics statement for more information. When you purchase through such links, you pay the same price and help support the content on this site.

A photographer’s review of the new M4 MacBook Pro

November 17, 2024

Don’t miss the huge Black Friday sales on the new M4 (and even better closeout deals on remaining M3 inventory) offering up to $600 off a wide range of options:

 

I just upgraded to the new M4 MAX MacBook Pro (MBP). That’s a significant cost given it’s replacing an M3 MAX MBP I bought only one year ago. But as the center of my art and business, I consider it a worthy upgrade (especially given my productivity affects my income and the net loss on upgrade costs is somewhat offset with tax considerations). Not many photographers should feel the need to upgrade from the M3 (or even M1) to this new laptop. But I think this is a notable launch for a few reasons: it pushes the bounds for extreme users, has some great display updates, and will ensure more people can afford the excellent older M1-M3 computers (new or used).

See my recommendations below for good, better (14″ or 16″), and best (14″ or 16″)options for most photographers.

What’s new and notable in the M4 MacBook Pro?

Before we discuss what’s new, I think it’s important to consider just how unique the 14-16″ Apple Silicon MacBook Pros are. All of them (all the way back to M1) offer:

  • The best laptop display for photographers:
    • I do not say this lightly, there is simply no other laptop on the market which offers a comparable experience.
    • Best-in-class HDR displays.
    • Extremely high color accuracy (calibration is optional for most users with these displays).
  • Outstanding performance and battery life.
    • Apple Silicon is a major advantage. These laptops run for a long time, with almost no fan noise, and no need for bulky chargers.
    • While SnapDragon X Elite chips look very promising for the future, there simply is not enough support for Windows on ARM software yet (for example, you cannot run any UXP plugins in Photoshop on WinARM).
  • Very high quality. These laptops look great, they’re tough, and the keyboard and trackpad feel great to use.

 

The M4 MacBook Pro raises the performance bar compared to the M3 series in several ways:

  • M4 Max offers 20% CPU / GPU faster performance vs M3 Max.
  • Much easier to see clearly when working near windows or outside thanks to:
    • SDR brightness can now be raised to 1000-nits (vs the previous 500 for M1/M2 or 600 for M3).
    • A new nano-texture display option to cut down on glare.
  • Less fan noise (they were already rare, but run even less often now)
  • Upgraded web cam to support “center stage” and better results in challenging lighting conditions.
  • Thunderbolt 5 to support 3x faster external devices (on the Pro and Max models)
  • Memory bandwidth has increased by 20-75% (up to a max of 546 GB/s vs a previous max of 400)
  • Battery life on the base and Pro versions has been increased by 2-4 hours (up to 24 hours total).
    • Note that the 14″ Max version is the same and the 16″ Max actually decreased by 1 hour.
  • Minimum specs have been significantly improved for the base model.
    • Minimum RAM has been increased to 16GB (at no extra cost!)
    • Even the base model now supports at least 2 external monitors (even when the laptop lid is open to see three screens total).

The gains here are iterative over the M3, but this is a larger generational leap than in previous years given the display and other updates on top of the performance improvements. This helps to solidify the MacBook Pro’s position as what I consider to already be the best laptop for photographers. I’m historically pretty agnostic on the Apple vs PC debate – but after trying a wide range of computers over the past year, I believe Apple has a notable edge in laptops for photography use. They feature a best-in-class HDR display, optimal performance / battery life, and excellent overall quality.

 

M4 MAX display:

Apple has the best laptop displays I’ve ever seen, and I have tested dozens of them in the past year. Their gorgeous HDR displays and high color accuracy are in a class of their own. I have never experienced another laptop display that’s on par with Apple’s. And now the M4 display has been updated and is significantly improved even over the M3. The display is much easier to see for productivity work in bright environments.

There are a few notable changes in the M4 display:

  1. Nan0-texture display (optional for $150)
  2. Increased peak SDR brightness (this is a software change, but likely enabled by improved efficiency with the QD film).
  3. The display apparently changed from a red KSF phospher film to QD (quantum dot).
  4. The color is a bit different than the prior displays.

That’s rather technical, and we’ll step through each of those changes below. But if you want to know the bottom line, it’s this: the M4 offers a vastly better display for working in bright ambient light. The other changes will grab the attention of color nerds, but shouldn’t affect most photographers.

The new nano-texture display is very nice. It significantly cuts glare from strong lights behind you, which makes it much easier to read text or enjoy photographs. The image quality is excellent under both bright and dark ambient light. The display is much easier to view with typical reflections. If you have a very powerful light source shining directly on the display, the nano-texture spreads it and it can actually be worse. But this is a terrible condition for either display and you should avoid things like letting the sun shine directly on the screen. Repositioning the display is the correct solution for those extreme scenarios. I see no downsides to this new option and think it is well worth a $150 upgrade to be able to more easily see the screen when working in the field, a coffee shop, etc. I expect this will be one of my favorite new features of the M4 over time.

The M4 now supports 1000 nits SDR (up from 600 nits in M3 and 500 nits in M1 / M2). This makes the display easier to see for productivity work in bright environments (this has no benefit for HDR as the display is still limited to 1600 nits peak brightness). The increased limit is not something you can set via slider nor a custom preset. Instead, it uses an elegant system to offer it automatically only when beneficial. The 1000 nits SDR brightness is allowed when all the following are true:

  • The ambient light sensor detects a bright environment (this is located right next to the web cam)
  • “automatically adjust brightness” is enabled in System Settings / Display
  • The brightness slider is set to the maximum.

To be clear, you cannot achieve 1000 nits by manually sliding to the max brightness if the automatic option is not enabled (personally, I believe setting the slider to maximum should always allow automatic use of 600-1000 nits based on ambient light, as the reasons for using a fixed brightness don’t apply when you’re pushing to the max and the limit is so far above any reasonable reference viewing condition). For those of you who are familiar with HDR, the headroom will be 1.4 stops if you set the slider to the max without auto (this implies ~600 nits SDR for a display that can achieve 1600 nits). If you turn on auto and have the brightness slider to the max, then HDR headroom will be somewhere between 0.7 to 2.0 stops depending on the level of ambient light (implying SDR luminance ranges from 400 to 1000 nits under auto when you push the slider to the max). In other words, when you enable auto brightness, the SDR white luminance is allowed to move within a moving range which is based on the brightness slider. I would recommend you enable the automatic brightness. Then if you need to target a fixed value for controlled / reference viewing, use a custom profile (for example 80-120 nits would often be ideal for critical photography work). You can create a custom profile under System Settings / Display at the bottom of the “preset” dropdown.

The change to a quantum dot (QD) film for the mini-LED display is not something I have seen documented by Apple, but it appears to be confirmed through testing by Ross Young. On that same post, note the comments from Blur Busters confirming that the M4 confirming benefits to pixel response time. If you view this test from Blur Busters and try to follow the bars with your eyes, you will see a cyan shift on the M3 whereas the M4 shows the white bars remaining neutral. The color shift in fast content on the old display is a result of red / green / blue sub-pixels not getting brighter / darker at the same rate. The new display offers better motion response and eliminates this cyan “flash”. Most people probably won’t notice this difference, but the new display is improved. Assuming that this all confirms the use of quantum dot technology, this likely implies improved efficiency and probably helped Apple enable the new 1000 nit SDR. The wider spectrum of the red sub-pixel may also reduce “observer metamerism” (ie the risk that difference people perceive color on the display differently when the red/green/blue colors are very narrow).

The color accuracy out of the box for the M4 is great, as has been the case with all recent Apple displays. But that does not mean perfect nor identical to other Apple displays. My M4 shows a slight but visible / measurable red bias in grey values, while my M3 shows a comparable bias towards green. This is just a sample size of two and could be variability within spec, but I suspect that the reason is more likely the new quantum dot film and it’s resulting impact to the “power spectral distribution” (PSD) of the display. It’s possible that the difference here is due to metameric failure (ie, the different spectral emission may not allow perfect matching). If anything, I expect the M4 is now more accurate as the peaky reds of the older displays are not ideal (probably more prone to metamerism). I don’t know and don’t have a spectro to confirm (which would be ideal to make both displays as accurate as possible). The changes here may affect the accuracy of profiling with a colorimeter (because such a device has to assume the PSD), so you may wish to contact your vendor to see if you need a software update from them for your colorimeter.

 

M4 MAX test results:

All my test results are a direct comparison of the fully-loaded 14″ M4 Max to the fully-loaded 14″ M3 Max.

Photoshop test results:

My G-Bench Photoshop benchmarking software is meant to evaluate performance on Photoshop tasks relevant for photographers. The time required to complete key tasks is weighted based on the estimated likelihood a photographer would use it. In other words, it’s meant to give you a reasonable way to compare how fast Photoshop would feel subjectively for a photographer.

The M4 Max achieved a weighted score of 34. That’s roughly 18% faster than the comparable M3 MAX (and roughly 40% faster than the M1 MAX). Note that my previous testing of the M3 Max showed a score of 44, whereas it is now down to 41.4. It has actually improved over the past year due to improvements in Photoshop itself.

The most significant gains in terms of total time were in opening images, smart objects, creating new adjustment layers (very helpful for actions/panels), and various blurs. The total test time (without weighting) decreased by 30 seconds (from 3:16 to 2:46). The most significant benefits here are for those who handle a lot of batch processing, large images, and smart objects.

I additionally tested Topaz Gigapixel, which ran 32% faster on the M4 (1:14 vs 1:38).

 

Lightoom test results:

Importing and exporting show the most benefit under the M4, which is consistent with the gains being related to writing data or tasks which are intensive on the CPU:

  • importing RAW or DNG filess was 16% faster on M4. (unlike my prior M3 vs M2 testing, I did not see a big difference)
  • exporting JPG was 27% faster on M4.
  • Applying AI Denoise was 7% faster on the M4 (27:30 vs 29:38 for 65 Nikon Z7ii images).
  • During the denoise test, the M3 fans kicked in sooner and continued to be significantly noisy for 5 minutes longer, so the M4 avoided 6+ minutes of significant fan noise.
  • exporting lossy DNG was actually 12% slower. I can’t think of a clear reason for the poor DNG results and suspect their may be room for the M4 to improve here with future software updates from Apple and/or Adobe (which might mean some of the advantages grow larger).

Video test results:

I did some very limited testing with video export and found mixed results for rendering 12-19 minute videos.

  • FCPX 11 was 40% faster when exporting as 12-minute movie as ProRes 4444 XQ (39 vs 65s) and 13% faster when exporting the same move as H.264 (66 vs 76s).
  • Handbrake was 13% faster, saving 29 seconds when exporting a 16-minute video (3:21 vs 3:50).
  • Screenflow was 8% faster, which saves 55 seconds exporting a roughly 15-minute video (11:11 vs 12:06).

Other test results:

Beyond this, I generally found about a 10-20% benefit for various tasks which are CPU intensive (GPU-intensive tasks show little benefit in my testing of current versions of software use for photography and video).

  • My build tasks for creating my Photoshop plugins were 12% faster.
  • Compressing 900 images into a ZIP was 10% faster (saving 31 seconds, 4:56 vs 5:27).
  • BlackMagic Design’s disk speed test showed write speeds were about 5% faster: 8300 MB/s write and 5750 read on the M4 vs 7900 and 5600 for the M3.

 

14″ vs 16″

I only have the 14″ to test. However, there are several good reports online about better cooling and reduced fan noise with the 16″. I think that is likely a benefit of the 16″. That said, I don’t think performance boosts / fan noise in relative rare and extreme scenarios is a key decision factor. If you want lightweight, small, or lower cost (especially for the minimum tier), the 14″ is likely still your best choice even if the 16″ might have some slight performance benefits.

 

Conclusions:

  • I highly recommend any of the M1-M4 14-16″ MacBook Pros for anyone using an Intel Mac laptop, PC laptop users interested in HDR, or anyone making the switch from desktop to laptop. Getting a used, refurb, or closeout stock of the M2 are all very attractive ways to get the best possible value.
  • These improvements make the best laptop for photography even better. I don’t say that lightly – I try to remain technology agnostic, but I believe the advantages of Apple Silicon and the XDR display offer clear and objective benefits for those focused primarily on photography.
  • The key highlights are significant improvements to performance across a wide range of applications, a much better display for working in challenging light (which is very common for landscape photographers), and significantly less fan noise.
  • While the M1 remains a great laptop, the M4 is getting close to the point where it cuts the time of many tasks in half. They’re both fast, but the M4 is blazing fast.
  • There are clear gains over the M2 and M3 as well, but probably not enough for many photographers to consider an early upgrade.

The M4 MacBook Pro is likely to be a compelling upgrade if:

  • You own any computer other than an M1 or later 14-16″ MacBook Pro. The HDR (XDR) display alone is worth an upgrade if you don’t already own one of its predecessors, it is in a class of its own. And the performance is stunning compared to anything before the M1.
  • You are upgrading not just from M2 or M3, but also increasing specs (such as bumping the CPU or storage).
  • You frequently work in bright environments where you will appreciate the nano-texture and brighter display.

See my prior reviews of the M1, M2, and M3 Max.

 

Recommended configurations for photographers:

I recommend the 14″ laptop for lightweight travel (ideally with an external monitor at home). The 16″ display offers valuable room for toolbars and such and is highly recommended if you won’t travel with it much, don’t use an external monitor, or want a larger HDR display (as options for external HDR monitors are currently limited/pricy).

Most photographers can use a fairly basic CPU option, but should get 16-32GB of RAM and target internal storage twice as large as the data you currently store to ensure room for growth. Apple has created a fairly complex set of feature dependencies (likely to help encourage some upgrades and manage logistics/cost). So it helps to take your time to look through the details.

A few key things to consider:

  • Test your CPU / GPU / SSD to know where your bottlenecks likely are, as this is where upgrades will give you the most benefit. Don’t guess – Apple has done a masterful job of tying certain upgrades to others (from a business perspective, their price segmentation is almost as impressive as the product – they clearly know how to encourage people to make bigger upgrades than they otherwise would have).
  • Storage is the best place to cut cost: it is the most expensive option and the only upgrade you can make after purchase. See suggested external SSDs below.
  • The nano-texture display is also worth considering for any of these tiers if you are likely to work in a bright environment.
  • The 16″ display offers a huge boost in usable screen and is definitely worth the upgrade if you’re buying into at least the Pro M4 level. However, the 14″ is much lighter and is probably best regardless of your budget if you travel much or hike with your laptop. The 14″ display is also the only option if you don’t wish to upgrade to at least the Pro chip.
  • The most useful upgrades are a minimum 24GB RAM and the nano-texture.
  • RAM is one of the cheaper upgrades and likely to offer pretty good gains up to 36GB (beyond which the returns are smaller and depend on your usage).
  • Unless you do a lot of video or massive import/export jobs with LR, you can easily skip upgrades to the number of CPUs / GPUs.

 

Here are the options I think make the most sense for photographers:

  • Good (budget-conscious): 14″ 10-core M4 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD for $1749 (there is no 16″ version with the base M4 chip, you’ll have to jump to the “better” category for a larger screen)
    • This offers a fast, high-quality computer with an outstanding HDR display. 16GB is the minimum RAM a photographer should purchase.
    • An upgrade to 24GB may a valuable upgrade in the long run as you’ll likely get more years out of it and/or be able to recoup some of that cost when you sell it later.
    • You could save even more with 512GB storage, but you’ll be very dependent on external drives for storage.
    • Alternatively, the remaining new M3 inventory should be available at great prices, and there will surely be many great deals on older used models.
  • Better (ideal for photography): base M4 Pro with 24GB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2,199 ($2,699 for the 16″ version).
    • The Pro CPU offers an extra Thunderbolt port over the base model and is required if you want a 16″ screen.
    • An upgrade to 48GB RAM is certainly worth considering (and probably offers more benefit than the upgraded Pro CPU / GPU options for Photoshop).
  • Best (for heavy Lightroom import/export, serious video work, or if money is no object): M4 Max, 48GB, 2TB for $4,099 ($4,399 for the 16″ version)
    • If you are buying the 14″ model, you will have to upgrade the CPU / GPU to go beyond 36GB of RAM. That sufficient for most photographers, but 48-64GB will benefit heavy users.
    • If you are buying the 16″ model, you might consider the 36 GB RAM and lesser CPU / GPU option for $3,899.

I went all in on the fully-loaded 14″ MacBook Pro, and particularly appreciate the large internal storage (I’m already using over 6TB, with another 13TB on an external RAID). The only option I skipped is the 16″ screen. I have a Pro Display XDR monitor for my HDR work and prefer the lightweight 14″ model for travel.

 

I recommend the following options to compliment the laptop:

  • External SSD drives
    • Internal storage is convenient – but this is much cheaper and a good way to expand if needed down the road.
    • USB SSD’s I personally use and recommend:
      • Sandisk Extreme Portable for up to 4TB. Very fast / compact and connects with a single cable. I find this is a great option for backing up the computer, or adding more storage if you don’t have enough internal to the laptop (always be sure to backup your drives).
      • Samsung T5 EVO 8TB. I’ve only had mine for a few weeks, but it is working great.
      • Vectotech 8TB. I have three of these and have used them for a long time without issue. They were my top pick for large storage before the price on the Samsung recently dropped.
    • A Thunderbolt SSD is much faster than USB, but at a higher cost. As I have ample internal storage, I have personally opted for cheaper USB drives and have limited experience with the common Thunderbolt models. Also given cost, most of them have limited reviews. So it is hard to comment on reliability and performance. If you are going to use one as primary storage because you buy a laptop with a small drive, I think this is well worth considering (and you should have a robust backup strategy for any external drive, as likely all of them will be less reliable than the internal Apple SSD). I have not personally tested the following drives, but they seem very promising and have good reviews:
      • LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt has a large number of positive reviews.
      • Sabrent Rocket XTRM Plus Thunderbolt3 offers a very fast (2700MB/s) and affordable 2TB option.
      • OWC Envoy Ultra Thunderbolt 5 offers twice the speed, at roughly twice the price of a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive. If you really need ultra fast, this looks like a great drive. It’s probably overkill for photographers given batch imports will be limited by your flash cards and individual images aren’t that large, but could be very attractive for those editing 4k or 8k video.
  • CalDigit TS4 dock. This makes it very easy to plug your laptop into everything with a single cable (which includes power for the laptop and data connections to monitor, hard drives, Ethernet, mouse, etc). It includes two downstream Thunderbolt ports, which I find very handy so that I can turn off my RAID drive without losing access to downstream devices. I owned the previous TS3 and it’s also a great option if you don’t care about multiple downstream TB ports.
  • An external HDR monitor. This is optional, but nice if you also want a larger HDR display to complement the outstanding one built into the MacBook Pro.

 

Should you consider the new M4 Mini? The only benefit is lower cost. If we compare my “good” laptop option above to the comparable M4 Mini (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD), you will save a maximum of $750. I say maximum because you may still need to buy a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers to use it. The extra cost of the laptop gives you a best in class HDR display and portability. If you do not care about either, then the Mini is a great value. And if you are eager for HDR, you can pick up one of these great recommended 42″ TVs for HDR for less than $1000. So it depends on your needs, but I many photographers would benefit significantly from the laptop.

 

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. See my ethics statement for more information. When you purchase through such links, you pay the same price and help support the content on this site.

AI order of operations in Camera RAW

November 11, 2024

Adobe Camera RAW has added several incredible AI-based tools in the past year, including:

It’s an incredible lineup of tools which work directly on the RAW, which allows results which are not only higher quality, but also non-destructive. And this second benefit has created a bit of a new conundrum. Your AI edits may interact with each other and require updating. For example, if you use the generative AI remove tool, you might need to update parts of your AI select sky mask to reflect new image content. As a result, you may sometimes see ACR show a button in the top left prompting you to “Update AI Settings“. This shows when you make an edit which requires updating existing AI edits in the image. If you don’t click to update the content, you might have significant problems (such as a bad sky mask).

While it would be amazing if these updates could happen automatically, there are several reasons why it is probably not practical for ACR to do this for you:

  1. Some of these AI tools run in the cloud and you might be offline. For example, you must be connected to the internet to use the generative remove tool.
  2. Performance may not be ideal. Some of these tools take several seconds (or much longer on older computers) and you probably wouldn’t want ACR to get locked up too often. Consider AI denoise: moving the amount slider requires updates to other AI content and you probably wouldn’t want a delay every time you move that slider. Better to tweak the amount and then let things like sky masks update once.
  3. Battery life or fan noise may be a problem if ACR was constantly updating AI content, as this requires significant CPU / GPU resources.

Perhaps we’ll see the need for updates reduced over time as Adobe continues to improve the AI tools, but these considerations probably won’t go away entirely. Either way, it’s part of the workflow required now to take advantage of these great tools.

Follow ACR’s order of operations for more efficient workflows:

Now that you understand why we need to manually update the AI content, it’s important to know how you can manage it effectively. There are a couple of key principles to know:

  • You must click “Update AI Settings” button to ensure you do not have artifacts.
    • However, you don’t have to click it right away, just before you’re done editing the RAW to ensure the final output is ok.
    • You can also click just the circular arrow to update one step at a time, which is mostly helpful for educational purposes (to see which update causes which change).
  • If you edit in the same order the AI works, you’ll save a lot of time (and can avoid the update button).
    • There is an order of operations to the AI. For example, denoise is always done before the other AI tools.
    • Anytime you impact one of the earlier steps, the later ones must be redone.

If you click the down arrow on the update AI settings button, ACR will show you the preferred order of operations. Anytime you change something higher on the list, everything below it must be redone. So the ideal order for you to work if you wish to avoid AI updates is:

  1. Denoise. While this is non-destructive, it is particularly ideal to get this slider right before you do any generative expand or remove (as redoing those can create artifacts and requires careful review).
  2. Generative expand. Due to resolution limits, you may not use this much yet. If you’re using this feature for a social export, you might want to do this on a duplicate layer/image – as you probably don’t want to commit to this yet for a full resolution image you might print.
  3. Generative remove. So ideally, you should deal with AI-based “cloning” before you start working on things like a sky mask.
  4. Lens blur.
  5. Adaptive profile. This tends to be fairly safe, as changes above won’t cause big changes here.
  6. Local masks. These tend to be fairly safe to update without causing problems, but it’s always ideal to review the details for any AI-based mask (which includes the first group of options under “create new mask”).

If you had to boil it down to the most important lesson: always do AI denoise first and try not to change it later. It’s great that you can if you need to, but you’ll save yourself a lot of work reviewing other local AI details if you don’t revisit denoise. Any time you change it, you may force updates to gen remove / expand, which need close attention to ensure you don’t introduce unwanted changes.

For more info, see Adobe’s support page.

Luminosity masking:

Download the FREE
luminosity masking panel »

Or, simplify luminosity masking
with Lumenzia:

Youtube Facebook-f Instagram

See the store page for Lumenzia and course info.
“Lumenzia” and “Greg Benz Photography” are registered trademarks of Greg Benz Photography LLC.
See licensing for Commercial and Creative Commons (Non-Commercial, Attribution) Licensing terms.
Join my affiliate program.
See my ethics and privacy statement.

Greg Benz Photography