I can’t sleep at night, I have trouble concentrating during the day. It’s on my mind, the voice in my head (or, more accurately, the voices, though they all sound like me) can’t stop going on and on about it. It’s distracting.

The cause of all of this inner tumult? A new still photography technology called HDR.

The confusion begins immediately.

If you are a still photographer you are thinking, “HDR has been around forever and is ugly and awful.” If you are a filmmaker you are thinking, “HDR has been around forever and is standard across the industry.” And if you are one of the one billion people with iPhones you’ve been shooting HDR still photographs (and HDR video, too) for years now, though you might not have known it.

It’s all true, though we are not all talking about the same thing.

When you say “HDR” to a photographer they are thinking of a technique that came out many years ago which solved the following problem: A digital image sensor can record a fixed range of brightness levels. If the scene you are shooting has the same brightness range or less, all is well. You will get good image data in both the dark areas of your scene and in the bright areas of your scene. However, if your scene has a larger range of brightness levels (like many outdoor scenes) than that of your sensor you have to pick which portion of the range you wish to record. You can shift your range lower and get more detail in the shadows (but the bright areas may go completely white) or you can worry about the high values and not worry so much about the shadows, which may go completely black.

It’s a choice, often made automatically by the camera, but the choice must be made somehow.

Another choice is to use an old technology confusingly also called HDR (which I am going to call “HDR Merge” from now on). The idea is simple, but only because some crafty programmer wrote the code to make it work so simply. Instead of choosing which brightness range you can record why not record it all, or at least a much bigger range? The trick is to take three or more images, say one favoring the shadows (letting the highlights go pure white), one favoring the middle range, and one favoring the highlights (letting the shadows go pure black). Then the HDR Merge program takes the best part of each and makes a new photo with the seemingly magical quality of having detail in the blackest shadows and the brightest highlights, all at the same time.

It’s a cool idea that was vastly overused by photographers who seemed to abandon all measures of taste and self-control. The colors were bizarre, the contrast strange, and on the whole, the images were a little sickening to look at, despite the glee of the practitioners of this new monotonous witchcraft. Not every photographer lost their bearings—HDR Merge is a good technique and highly useful in many situations—but in still photography circles the letters “HDR” are so often now met with derision and eye-rolling, the conversation over before it begins.

However, there is another way to solve the same problem of the brightness range of the scene exceeding what the imaging chip can record. Instead of using HDR Merge to shoot different portions of the scene’s brightness range and then shrink that range down why not just extend the brightness range that the imaging chip can record?

I’ll say it again. Why not just expand the brightness range that the imaging chip can record?

Let’s just call this new possibility “HDR.” (A confusing choice of name but that’s what it is called, sorry.)

And here is where the shock and some of the confusion kicks in for many photographers—your camera already records in this expended brightness range and has done so for many years. And, if you’ve been shooting in one of the RAW formats, all of those images secretly contain the image data for this expanded new HDR brightness range. You’ve had an HDR camera all along and didn’t realize it.

Why then can’t you see that extended brightness range? Because of cathode ray tubes, because of old TV technology. The basic characteristics of Tube TVs were, in the 1990s, adopted by the digital imaging world. You may have heard of sRGB (called Rec. 709 when using video) which is a color standard. It matched what tube TVs could do, more or less, and limiting the number of colors the use of sRGB resulted in small file sizes, perfect for a world of the primordial Internet with dial-up modems. Those early computer monitors also adopted a brightness range, later called SDR (for Standard Dynamic Range), based upon those same cathode ray tube TVs. As the years went by the colors got better but we still had the SDR brightness range.

Thus, you can’t view an HDR image that utilizes all of that extra brightness range with a monitor that does not display that extra brightness range. It’s really that simple.

To view an HDR still image you need an HDR monitor. And, similar to the surprise you might have felt when I said that you already have an HDR camera (and may very well have a library of HDR images going back to your first digital camera) you might be surprised to learn that you may already have an HDR screen. You might have two of them,. It is likely you have three or more.

I have an iPhone 11. Yes, four generations old, soon to be five generations old when the iPhone 16 comes out in four weeks. It has an HDR screen and shoots still and video in HDR by default. I have an LG television. Like most televisions sold in the past few years, it has an HDR screen. I think it would be hard to find a TV nowadays, outside of the very small screens and budget options, that doesn’t have HDR. And I have a MacBook Pro, a year or two old, that has an extraordinarily good HDR screen. iPads have HDR screens, too. And many desktop computer monitors are HDR.

HDR screens are sneaking into our lives primarily because of the video world, which adopted HDR wholeheartedly some time ago. Still, photographers are just now catching up, most still unaware that a revolution in imaging is not just coming soon but already here.

So let me ask again: Why can’t you see the extended brightness range that is in your HDR files, made by your HDR camera? One answer, as I said, is that you don’t have an HDR monitor. You can’t see what your monitor can’t display. The other answer, if you do have an HDR monitor, is that your image file has been made to display on an SDR monitor and doesn’t know that it is being displayed on an HDR monitor.

To view an HDR image you need an HDR monitor and an HDR image. It seems so simple to write out like that but it can be a little hard for a photographer to get their head around, so ingrained and so deep is the undiscussed idea that the SDR brightness range is not a law of nature but some standard that made sense in the 1990s but seems arbitrary and limiting thirty years later.

If you have an HDR monitor and want to create an HDR image you need an image editor that can work in HDR. As of this writing, that means Pixelmator (on the Mac: xxxx) or Lightroom (link xxxx) on various operating systems. In Lightroom, for example, you just hit the HDR button above the histogram and then notice that the histogram will suddenly change, offering up to four stops of additional brightness range. In Pixelmator, you’ll see the HDR button right there at the top of the righthand panes. You might not be shocked to learn that Apple Photos already supports viewing HDR since iPhones have been shooting HDR photos for years.

Seeing the image change when you engage HDR in an image editor can be disconcerting. Don’t worry, keep calm. There will be a period of adjustment, a bit of time to become acclimatized to this new photographic world. Some photographs (especially those with pronounced high values such as images with skies or light sources) will change dramatically. For other images, the change will be less pronounced or will show no change at all. HDR does not change the lower or middle brightness values, it just expands the range of the brighter image values. Play a bit with your images, get a feel for things.

It’s so very different than before.

The dust hasn’t settled, standards are not fully agreed upon, the HDR stills world is a bit of the Wild West. Photoshop supports HDR but barely. Lightroom supports HDR but not in every mode. Opera and Chrome will display HDR images but Safari’s support is not quite here yet (coming in September). And I can’t yet display HDR images here in my blog. WordPress (the software that runs this blog) now supports HDR and ImageMagick (the technology WordPress uses to display images) supports HDR, but for some reason, my web site host, Dreamhost, is “still working on it.”

For filmmakers, nothing is happening. For iPhone photographers, nothing is happening. For all other photographers a revolution—and a revelation—is underway.