Which does hdr stand for?

HDR stands for high dynamic range. Put simply, it's the range of light and dark tones in your photos. The human eye has a very high dynamic range — which is why we can see details in both shadows and highlights.

HDR (High Dynamic Range), as the name suggests, introduces a wider range of colors and brightness levels compared to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) signals. HDR signals send metadata to your TV, which is a list of instructions for the TV to display content properly. The source tells the TV what exact color to display at which exact brightness level, whereas SDR is limited to a range of brightness and colors. For example, with SDR, a car would be ordered to apply "full throttle" or "50% throttle." Instead, the HDR car would be asked to "go to 120 mph" and "go to 40 mph." Some vehicles would provide a worse experience than others working towards this task, and most might not even succeed. In the case of TVs, SDR is a specific set power, while HDR is a set goal.

You can see an example above of what an HDR image looks like compared to an SDR image on the same TV. The HDR image appears more life-like, and you can see more details in darker areas, like in the shadows of the cars. Having a TV with HDR support doesn't necessarily mean HDR content will look good, as you still need a TV that can display the wide range of colors and brightness required for good HDR performance.

There are different types of HDR signals that can be sent, and they're either with static or dynamic metadata. Dynamic metadata changes on a scene-per-scene basis, while static metadata remains the same for the whole length of the movie or show you're watching. It means that if content uses dynamic metadata, it can lower its peak brightness for a darker scene and increase its brightness for a brighter scene to make highlights pop, so it has a clear advantage. With content that uses static metadata, the brightness remains the same throughout, meaning some scenes can be over-brightened or not dark enough.

Regardless, between static and dynamic HDR metadata, both get brighter than in SDR, which is one of the main advantages of watching HDR content over SDR. Both HDR and SDR are mastered at a certain peak brightness, but HDR is mastered at a minimum of 400 nits, while SDR is mastered at 100 nits. Because every TV hits 100 nits without issue, it's only brighter TVs that can take full advantage of the increased peak brightness in HDR.

The two most common dynamic metadata formats, Dolby Vision and HDR10+, each use dynamic metadata, while HDR10 is a static format that forms the basis of HDR signals. Despite the name similarities, HDR10 and HDR10+ are different formats. Some TVs support the two dynamic formats, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, while others support one but not the other. While thinking about which format your TV supports is usually an afterthought, it's important to consider depending on which content you watch. For example, if you constantly stream content from Netflix in Dolby Vision and get a TV that only supports HDR10+, you won't be watching content to its full capabilities. The format doesn't affect the overall picture quality, but it limits you on which HDR content you can watch if your TV doesn't support the format.

When comparing metadata in HDR versus SDR, it's important to remember that HDR content is sent with a specific set of instructions for how the TV should display it, while SDR content uses the TV's processing to control more of the image. This is why not all TVs can display HDR content how it should look like.

Learn about the differences between HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision

Below, we'll discuss the three most important aspects of HDR content: the peak brightness, the color gamut, and the gradient handling.

Peak brightness is probably one of the most important aspects of HDR. This is where high-end TVs have the biggest advantage, as HDR content makes use of their higher brightness capabilities to show lifelike highlights. If a TV has limited HDR peak brightness, it can't properly display all the highlights the content is supposed to show.

Having a high contrast ratio and a good local dimming feature is also important for delivering a good HDR experience because the TV can show bright and dark highlights without losing details. However, the contrast is independent of HDR, and you can still have deep blacks with SDR content.

Above, you can see what HDR looks like on a high-end TV like the Samsung QN90A QLED versus an entry-level TV like the TCL 4 Series/S446 2021 QLED. The Samsung has incredible contrast and high peak brightness, so it really makes the image pop, and you get a sense of how bright the hallway is. However, the TCL has low HDR peak brightness and low contrast, so it can't properly distinguish the bright and dark areas of the screen and doesn't even look like the lights are turned on. HDR is all about delivering a more impactful and vivid image, and the QN90A does exactly that.

Learn more about the HDR peak brightness

A TV's color gamut defines the range of colors it displays. There are two common color spaces used for HDR content: the DCI-P3 color space that's used in most HDR content and the Rec. 2020 color space that's slowly being included with more content. The difference between the two spaces is simply the number of colors each space covers, as Rec. 2020 is wider. Both of these cover a wider range of colors than in SDR. A TV needs to display a wide color gamut, as doing so helps improve the picture quality.

The color volume is the range of colors a TV displays at different luminance levels. So this is where the peak brightness and contrast help the TV, as a higher peak brightness helps it show bright shades, while a higher contrast is important if it needs to display darker colors.

Above, you can see two graphs of the Rec. 709 color space used in SDR content and the Rec. 2020 color space used in HDR. Rec. 2020 requires a lot more colors, which helps make images appear more life-like. Most modern TVs don't have any problems displaying all the colors necessary for SDR, but coverage of the wider color spaces can be a struggle for some TVs.

Learn more about the color gamut and the color volume

Gradient handling is a bit more technical than the peak brightness and color gamut. It defines how well a TV displays colors at different shades, and this is important for scenes with a sky or sunset. If your TV has good gradient handling, that means that the sky transitions between the different colors well, but if the TV has bad gradient handling, you'll see banding that can be distracting. Gradient handling is important for watching HDR content because HDR requires 10-bit color depth, and while most modern TVs can display a 10-bit signal, not all of them do it well. Color depth is the amount of information used to display a certain color, so a higher color depth holds more information. It's also why HDR content uses 10-bit color, while SDR has 8-bit color depth. Keep in mind that not all TVs that accept 10-bit signals have a 10-bit panel, as some use 8-bit panels with dithering to help display a 10-bit signal, but it doesn't affect the overall picture quality much.

If you look at the images above, you can see how there's much more banding in the orange sky on an 8-bit image versus a 10-bit image on the same TV. It's because 8-bit color depth has less information, meaning it can't properly display those minor color changes. Most modern TVs have good enough gradient handling, but there are a few where the banding is obvious. Below, you can see two examples of what good and bad gradient handling looks like on our gradient test pattern. There's clear banding on the right, especially in darker shades.

Learn more about gradient handling

Although HDR was primarily designed for movies, it's made its way into video games. While you won't get the same fantastic HDR picture quality in games as in movies because games aren't mastered the same way as movies for the highest brightness possible, HDR games still deliver a better viewing experience than SDR games. Modern TVs are designed to have low input lag in HDR Game Mode, so you get the same responsive feel as if you were playing SDR games. However, there are some limitations with HDR gaming, as some TVs can't display 4k @ 120Hz signals in Dolby Vision from the Xbox Series X, so you're limited to 60 fps in that case.

So, after all this, when do you know if you're watching content in HDR or SDR? The simple answer is to know which type of content you're watching and look for any symbols that pop up. If you're streaming content from Netflix, you'll see a symbol to tell you which HDR format it's in, like HDR10 or Dolby Vision. Another way is to look at the TV settings menu and see if there's an HDR symbol in the picture settings.

If you see that the content you're watching is in SDR and want to change to HDR, first make sure the content is available in HDR before trying to switch. Check your TV's settings regarding the HDMI signal format or bandwidth (the exact name varies per brand), and make sure your TV is set to the highest signal format possible because HDR requires more bandwidth. If you're playing video games, you likely have to check the system or game settings to enable HDR. Of course, if your content doesn't support HDR, there's nothing you can do, and you're stuck in SDR.

TV contrast is the difference between how dark and how bright the picture can get. Dynamic range describes the extremes in that difference, and how much detail can be shown in between. Essentially, dynamic range is display contrast, and HDR represents broadening that contrast. However, just expanding the range between bright and dark is insufficient to improve a picture's detail. Whether a panel can reach 200 nits (relatively dim) or 2,000 nits (incredibly bright), and whether its black levels are 0.1cd/m^2 (washed-out, nearly gray) or 0 (completely dark), it can ultimately only show so much information based on the signal it's receiving.

Many popular video formats, including broadcast television and Blu-ray discs, are limited by standards built around the physical boundaries presented by older technologies. Black is set to only so black, because as Christopher Guest eloquently wrote, it could get "none more black." Similarly, white could only get so bright within the limitations of display technology. Now, with organic LED (OLED) and local dimming LED backlighting systems on newer LCD panels, that range is increasing. Both blacks and whites can reach further extremes, but video formats can't take advantage of it. Only so much information is presented in the signal, and a TV capable of reaching beyond those limits can only work with the information present.

That's where HDR video comes in. It removes the limitations presented by older video signals and provides information about brightness and color across a much wider range. HDR-capable displays can read that information and show an image built from a wider gamut of color and brightness. HDR video simply contains more data to describe more steps in between the extremes. This means that bright objects and dark objects on the same screen can be shown to high degrees of brightness and darkness if the display supports it, with all the necessary steps in between described in the signal and not synthesized by the image processor.

To put it more simply, HDR content on HDR-compatible TVs can get brighter, darker, and show more shades of gray in between than non-HDR content. Of course, this varies between TVs. Some can get bright and dark enough to do an HDR signal justice, while others do not. Similarly, HDR-compatible TVs can produce deeper and more vivid reds, greens, and blues, and show more color variation in between. Deep shadows aren't simply black voids; more details can be seen in the darkness, while the picture stays dark. Bright shots aren't simply sunny, vivid pictures; fine details in the brightest surfaces remain clear. Vivid objects aren't simply saturated; more degrees of color can be seen.

This requires much more data and not all media can handle it. For example, standard Blu-ray discs cannot support HDR. Fortunately, Ultra HD Blu-ray (which is distinct from Blu-ray, despite the name) can hold more data, and is built to contain 4K video, HDR video, and even object-based surround sound like Dolby Atmos. Ultra HD Blu-rays, however, require Ultra HD Blu-ray players or relatively new game consoles to play them.

Some online streaming services also offer HDR content, but you need a reliably fast connection to get it. Fortunately, if your bandwidth is high enough for 4K video, it can get HDR, too; Amazon Prime Video and Netflix recommend connection speeds of 15Mbps and 25Mbps, respectively, for 4K content regardless of whether that content is HDR or not.

This is where HDR gets a bit more confusing. Wide color gamut is another feature high-end TVs have, and it's even less defined than HDR. It's also connected to HDR, but not directly. HDR deals with how much light a TV is told to put out, or luminance. The range and value of color, defined separately from light, is called chromaticity. They're two separate values that interact with each other in several ways, but are still distinct.

Technically, HDR specifically only addresses luminance, because that's what dynamic range is: the difference between light and dark on a screen. Color is a completely separate value based on absolute red, green, and blue levels regardless of the format of the video. However, they're tied together by how we perceive light, and a greater range of light means we'll perceive a greater range of color. HDR-capable TVs can often show what's called "wide color gamut," or a range of color outside of the standard color values used in broadcast TV (called Rec.709).

This doesn't mean HDR guarantees a wider range of colors, or that they'll be consistent. That's why we test every TV for both contrast and color. Nearly all TVs today can hit Rec.709 values, but that still leaves a large gap between what color those TVs produce and what the eye can actually see. DCI-P3 is a standard color space for digital cinema, and it's much wider. Most modern 4K HDR TVs should to able to reach the DCI-P3 values, though many don't quite make it. Rec.2020 is the ultimate, ideal color space for 4K TVs, and it's wider still—but we've yet to see any consumer display reach those levels. And here's the kicker: Rec.2020 applies to both SDR (standard dynamic range) and HDR, because HDR doesn't directly address color levels.

The above chart shows the range of color the human eye can detect as an arch and the three color spaces we mentioned as triangles. As you can see, each expands significantly on the previous one.

All of this might seem confusing, but it boils down to this: HDR doesn't guarantee that you'll get more color. Many HDR TVs have wide color gamuts, but not all of them. Our TV reviews tell you whether a TV is HDR-capable and what its full range of color looks like.

HDR isn't quite universal and is currently split into two major formats, with a few others in the background.

Dolby Vision is Dolby's own HDR format. While Dolby requires certification for media and screens to say they're Dolby Vision compatible, it isn't quite as specific and absolute as HDR10. Dolby Vision content uses dynamic metadata. Static metadata maintains specific levels of brightness across whatever content you watch. Dynamic metadata adjusts those levels based on each scene or even each frame, preserving more detail between scenes that are very bright or very dark. By tweaking the maximum and minimum levels of light a TV is told to generate on the fly, the same amount of data that would be assigned across the full range of light an entire movie or show uses can be set across a much more specific, targeted span. Darker scenes can preserve more detail in shadows and brighter scenes can keep more detail in highlights, because they aren't telling the TV to be ready to show opposite extremes that won't even show up until the next scene.

Dolby Vision also uses metadata that's adjusted to the capabilities of your specific display, instead of dealing with absolute values based on how the video was mastered. This means that Dolby Vision video will tell your TV what light and color levels to use based on values set between the TV manufacturer and Dolby that keep in mind the capabilities of your specific TV. It can potentially let TVs show more detail than HDR10, but that ultimately depends on how the content was mastered and what your TV can handle in terms of light and color. That mastering aspect is important, because Dolby Vision is a licensed standard and not an open one like HDR10. If Dolby Vision is available in the end video, that probably means that Dolby workflows were used all the way through.

Dolby Vision is the most widely supported HDR format after HDR10, with content on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, and Netflix.

HDR10 is the standard pushed by the UHD Alliance. It's a technical standard with defined ranges and specifications that must be met for content and displays to qualify as using it. HDR10 uses static metadata that is consistent across all displays. This means HDR10 video sets light and color levels in absolute values, regardless of the screen it's being shown on. It's an open standard, so any content producer or distributor can use it freely. Every service with HDR content supports HDR10, usually along with Dolby Vision or another HDR format.

HDR10+ is a standard developed by Samsung. It builds on HDR10 by adding dynamic metadata, like Dolby Vision. It doesn't use individualized metadata for each screen, but it still adjusts the range of light it tells the TV to display for each scene or frame. It can potentially add more detail to your picture over what HDR10 shows, and like HDR10 it's an open standard that doesn't require licensing with a very specific production workflow.

Currently, HDR10+ is in use by Hulu, Paramount+, and YouTube.

Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) isn't as common as HDR10 or Dolby Vision, and there's very little content for it yet outside of some BBC and DirecTV broadcasts, but it could make HDR much more widely available. That's because it was developed by the BBC and Japan's NHK to provide a video format that broadcasters could use to send HDR signals (and SDR; HLG is backwards-compatible). It's technically more universal because it doesn't use metadata at all; instead, it uses a combination of the gamma curve that TVs use to calculate brightness for SDR content and a logarithmic curve to calculate the much higher levels of brightness that HDR-capable TVs can produce (hence the name Hybrid Log-Gamma).

HLG can work with SDR and HDR TVs despite the lack of metadata while still holding a much wider range of light data. The only issue? Adoption. It's developed for broadcasters, and we still don't see many broadcasters pushing 4K video over the airwaves, cable, or satellite services. HLG still has far to go in terms of content. Currently, it's mostly being pushed in the UK, with some HLG nature and sports shows.

Each type of HDR offers significant improvements over standard dynamic range, but each has advantages and disadvantages. In terms of adoption, HDR10 and Dolby Vision are the only significant standards that have both plenty of content and widespread TV compatibility. Dolby Vision potentially offers a better picture, but it's less common than HDR10 because it's a licensed, workflow-based standard and not an open one. HDR10+ is open, but we'll need to see more companies actually start to use it before more content becomes available. HLG has the technical potential to become the most universal standard due to its metadata-less nature, but so far it's seen very little traction.

Basically, you need HDR content, a medium through which to play HDR content, and a TV that supports HDR signals.

HDR is not simply 4K. A 4K TV might support HDR, but that doesn't apply to all sets. If your TV doesn't support HDR, it won't take advantage of the additional information in the signal. Even if the TV can handle an HDR signal, it might not produce a better picture, particularly if it's a less-expensive TV. The majority of 4K TVs available today support HDR, though cheaper models might simply not have the contrast or color range to really show it.

Most major streaming services support HDR for some 4K content. There are also UHD Blu-ray discs, which often feature HDR10 or occasionally Dolby Vision HDR.

If your TV supports HDR, it probably has access to at least some streaming services that support HDR. However, it might not have all of them, so you might want to get a separate media streamer. The Apple TV 4K, Amazon Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick 4K, Chromecast with Google TV, and Roku Streaming Stick 4K all support HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and HLG.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both support HDR10 and Dolby Vision for streaming apps as well as UHD Blu-ray playback. Of course, the all-digital versions of the consoles, lacking optical drives, can't play UHD Blu-ray discs, but they can still stream 4K HDR content.

4K is now the effective standard for TVs, and HDR is one of the most important features to consider when buying a new one. It still isn't quite universal, but both HDR10 and Dolby Vision have proven to offer some compelling improvements in contrast and color over standard definition, and there's plenty of content to watch with both. If you're looking to make the jump to 4K and you have the budget for it, HDR is a must-have feature.

Not all HDR TVs are the same, however. And just because a TV is labeled "4K HDR" doesn't mean you'll get any increase in performance.

So is HDR worth the hype? In two words: largely, yes. There are important caveats to consider when you're buying a new TV, and even after you've gotten your HDR TV home and set up. Here are some highlights before we dive in:

The two most important factors in how a TV looks are contrast ratio, or how bright and dark the TV can get, and color accuracy, which is basically how closely colors on the screen resemble real life (or whatever palette the director intends). This isn't just my opinion, but also that of nearly every other TV reviewer, people who have participated in multi-TV face-offs at stores and for websites/magazines, and industry experts like the Imaging Science Foundation.

If you put two TVs side by side, one with a better contrast ratio and more accurate color, and the other with just a higher resolution (more pixels ), the one with greater contrast ratio will be picked by pretty much every viewer. It will look more natural, "pop" more and just seem more "real," despite having lower resolution.

HDR expands the range of both contrast and color significantly. Bright parts of the image can get much brighter, so the image seems to have more "depth." Colors get expanded to show more bright blues, greens, reds and everything in between.

Wide color gamut (WCG) is along for the ride with HDR, and that brings even more colors to the table. Colors that, so far, were impossible to reproduce on any television. The reds of a fire truck, the deep violet of an eggplant, even the green of many street signs. You may have never noticed before that these weren't exactly how they looked in real life, but you sure will now. WCG will bring these colors and millions more to your eyeballs.

For a bunch of background info on how color works on TVs, check out Ultra HD 4K TV color, part I: Red, green, blue and beyond, and Ultra HD 4K TV color, part II: The (near) future.

One of the most important things to know about HDR TVs is that TV HDR is not the same as HDR for photography

I wrote an entire article about the difference, but the main takeaway is that HDR for TVs is not a picture-degrading gimmick (akin to the soap opera effect). It is definitely not that.

TV HDR: Expanding the TV's contrast ratio and color palette to offer a more realistic, natural image than what's possible with today's HDTVs.

Photo HDR: Combining multiple images with different exposures to create a single image that mimics a greater dynamic range.

HDR for TVs aims to show you a more realistic image, one with more contrast, brightness and color than before.

An HDR photo taken by a camera or an iPhone isn't "high-dynamic range" in this sense. The image doesn't have the dynamic range possible in true HDR. It's still a standard dynamic range image, it just has some additional info in it due to the additional exposures.

A TV HDR image won't look different the way a photo HDR image does. It merely looks better.

There are two parts of the HDR system: the TV and the source.

The first part, the TV, is actually the easier part. To be HDR-compatible, the TV should be able to produce more light than a normal TV in certain areas of the image. This is basically just like local dimming, but to an even greater extent.

Tied in with HDR is wide color gamut, or WCG. For years, TVs have been capable of a greater range of colors than what's possible in Blu-ray or downloads/streaming. The problem is, you don't really want the TV just creating those colors willy-nilly. It's best left to the director to decide how they want the colors of their movie or TV show to look, not a TV whose color-expanding process might have been designed in a few days 6,000 miles from Hollywood. More on this in a moment.

Of course, making TVs brighter and more colorful costs money, and some HDR TVs will deliver better picture quality than others. In our experience the TVs that perform best with HDR are LCD-based models that have local dimming as well as OLED TVs. A TV that lacks those features can look better than a non-HDR TV, but the difference won't be as noticeable.

The only thing the HDR label really means is that the TV will be able to display HDR movies and TV shows. It has nothing to do with how well it can show those images.

The content is the hard part. To truly look good, an HDR TV needs HDR content. Fortunately, the amount of HDR content is growing fast. The major 4K streaming services like Netflix and Amazon both have HDR content. As do many others.

Another source of HDR is physical discs. Ultra HD Blu-ray is the latest physical disc format. You'll need a new 4K BD player to play these discs, but your current Blu-ray and DVDs will play on the new players. Most 4K Blu-ray discs have HDR as well.

When a movie or TV show is created, the director and cinematographer work with a colorist to give the program the right "look." It's entirely possible that if you were on set for these two scenes, they would have looked the same, color-wise. Post-production tweaking can imbue a scene with a certain aesthetic and feeling, just with color. From the exuberant, eye-popping colors of a movie musical, to the muted somberness of a moody drama, there's a lot that can be conveyed just with color.

When making movies, the team is able to use the wide palette of the Digital Cinema P3 color space to create gorgeous teals, oranges and violets.

But then comes time to make these movies work on TV. In order to do that, that team essentially "dumbs down" the image, removing dynamic range and limiting color. They get it to look the way they want, given the confines of the HDTV system, and that limited version is what you get on Blu-ray or a download.

If your TV is set to the Movie or Cinema mode, this is approximately what you'll get at home. If you're in the Vivid or Dynamic mode, the TV will then exaggerate the colors as it sees fit. It's creating something that isn't there, because at the mastering stage, the director and her team had to take that all out. Is the "Vivid" version close to what they saw or what was in the theater? Doubtful, and there's no way to know since it's your TV's creation.

Thanks to the additional storage and transmission capacities of 4K BD and streaming video from Amazon, Netflix and others, additional data, called metadata, can be added to the signal. It tells HDR/WCG TVs exactly how they should look, exactly what deeper colors to show, and exactly how bright a given highlight, reflection, star, sun, explosion or whatever should be. This is a huge advancement in how we're able to see images on TVs.

One example of how this is down is Technicolor's Intelligent Tone Mapping tool for content creators. It's designed to let creators more easily (as in, more affordably) create HDR content. I've seen it in action, and the results are very promising. This is a good thing, as it means it's not labor-intensive to create HDR versions of movies and shows. If it took tons of time, and time equals money, then we'd never get any HDR content. This is just one example of the process.

You won't need new cables for HDR... probably. Even if you do need new cables, they're very inexpensive. Current High-Speed HDMI cables can carry HDR. Your source device (a 4K Blu-Ray player or media streamer, say) and the TV must be both be HDR-compatible, regardless of what cables you use. If you use a receiver, that too must be HDR-compatible, to be able to pass the signals from the source to the TV.

If you've bought your gear in the last few years, it's probably HDR-compatible. If you're not sure, put the model number into Google with "HDR" after it and see what comes up.

The next generation of HDMI connection is called 2.1, and it adds a number of new features, including some improvements to how HDR is handled. It's something to keep in mind for your next purchase, but it doesn't make your current gear obsolete and will largely be backward compatible (other than the new features).

Most experts I've spoken to frequently say something along the lines of "More pixels are cool, but better pixels would be amazing." Which is to say 4K and 8K resolutions are fine, but HDR and WCG are far more interesting. What we've seen, now that we've had a few generations of HDR TVs to sort out the bugs, is a general improvement in overall image quality, though perhaps not quite to the extent many of us (myself included) initially expected. That said, a good-performing HDR TV, showing HDR content, will look better than the TVs from just a few years ago. In some cases they are significantly brighter and with a much wider range of colors, which is quite a sight to see. Check out our reviews for which is the best TV right now.

If you're curious about how HDR works, check out the aptly named How HDR works.

Note: This article was originally published in 2015 but was updated in 2021 with current info and links.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, in photography terms, Dynamic Range is the difference between the lightest and darkest elements of an image. HDR is a process that helps increase this dynamic range beyond what is normally captured by a smartphone lens. This can help create a more accurate representation of what you see with your eyes or sometimes create a more artistic high definition feel to the landscapes. The ultimate goal of HDR is to create a more impressive picture and it is not a feature that should be turned on for every single photograph. The effectiveness of HDR varies with the situation and mainly depends on what you are shooting.

Also Read: Top 10 Smartphones With A Dedicated Depth Sensor Camera To Capture Perfect Bokeh Shots

When you have HDR enabled and hit the shutter button, the camera captures several images in quick succession with different exposure values and then the camera software combines these images into a single photo that maintains detail from the darkest and the brightest regions. Prior to this functionality is implemented, some advanced users would manually capture three photos at different exposure levels and then transfer them to the PC to edit it on Photoshop or Lightroom from Adobe. These functionalities primarily combined the three images highlighting the best parts of the image to achieve the best effect.

Luckily, this is now implemented as standard on most modern smartphones and almost every manufacturer has adapted HDR to their camera software. When HDR is activated the phone does all the work automatically to capture the image and combine them to produce a wide range of highlights. Given the fact that HDR works by capturing multiple images and combining them together, it works best in static shots with steady hands.

Some new smartphones come with Auto HDR feature which you can turn on to let the smartphone decide when to use HDR. Smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S20, Note 10 and others also support HDR10+ video allowing you to capture videos in High Dynamic Range.

Also Read: Cashify Explains: Which SoC Is The Best? Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Vs A13 Bionic Vs Kirin 990 5G Vs Exynos 990

HDR usage is more subjective than it appears, there isn’t one single best way to use HDR, it generally boils down to what you want to achieve from the photo. We’ve included some tips for users who want to use HDR to understand what are the best situations to use this feature.

When you are capturing a good photo, the lighting is one of the most important aspects, however, when you are outdoor, sunlight can cause too much contrast. HDR can balance this discrepancy so there are fewer bright white or dark black spots, below are two images with HDR enabled and then with HDR disabled, you can grab a closer look at the images to understand the difference HDR causes.