(Note: If you are seeing the above image in Safari or in any other non-HDR browser you are seeing a dark, dull, ugly conversion. If you are seeing it in Opera or Chrome on an HDR monitor you are seeing the real thing–a dramatic difference.)

One of the most exciting technological developments in still photography is the (long overdue) advent of HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is not to be confused with the earlier HDR. (Yes, we need a new name but we are not getting a new name).

With HDR photographs there is a great deal of additional detail in the highlights and the highlights can go much brighter than before. The difference is astonishing, so much so that after working in HDR for a while it’s hard to go back to non-HDR images on a screen. They just look dull.

HDR is new and like all new things in technology, the road forward for practitioners is rocky, especially in how to display and share HDR images. But today a few of those obstacles have been removed on the MacOS.

I tested these with AVIF files with HDR and Rec 2020 color space.

Quickview, Apple’s utility for peeking at a file without opening it, has been updated so that the image, once opened in Quickview, will display HDR properly. The small icon in their finder remains non-HDR.

Messages has also benefited from being updated so that HDR images display properly but only when clicked and enlarged. The mini-version embedded in the text conversation is not yet in HDR.

Preview, Apple’s PDF reader, will open and display HDR files correctly if opened directly by the app. I tested with all manner of HDR files—every file type Lightroom could export—and all opened in glorious HDR. However, images in PDFs, even if created by Preview, will not display in HDR. Adobe Acrobat does not display HDR images correctly at all. The main issue here is that we are waiting for the group that controls that PDF standard to update the spec to allow HDR. They are working on it but with no announced timeline.

My expectation is that further updates (especially the highly desired HDR support in Apple’s web browser, Safari) will fully integrate HDR into the MacOS, not only including Safari but also Pages, Apple’s word processor, and Mail, their e-mail client.

This is all terribly exciting (and terribly distracting—I’m trying to get work done) and represents a great opportunity to create electric images that are fundamentally different than their print cousins. The digital still image is being reborn.