Artistic HDR™
HDR delivers peak visual fidelity by physically boosting your display’s pixel brightness and vibrancy in the image’s highlight areas. Artistically hand-toned by the photographer.
What is HDR?
When you’re looking at an image, do you realize that as some areas appear brighter, their colors move closer to pure white—and as this happens, vibrant colors start losing their richness? Imagine neon lights or a vibrant blue sky; when these colors become brighter, they become washed out and pale.
Since people first started making realistic images, we’ve been limited to using color to represent brightness—essentially using lighter colors to “trick” your brain into seeing brightness. But this trick has another limit beyond losing highlight colors: once an area becomes pure white, you can’t show anything brighter.
A Tale of Two HDRs
Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) refers to what we have been able to achieve given this fundamental limitation. And there is HDR, or High Dynamic Range, but the term has evolved over time.
Years ago, "HDR" referred to photographing multiple images at different exposure levels, and merging them into a single SDR image. This technique didn’t improve display technology but instead aimed to work around the dynamic range limit of cameras.
Modern cameras typically have the capability to capture plenty of dynamic range and store that data in RAW files. During the toning process, photographers have the option to pull the details from the RAW file and fit them into an SDR image. But we have to be very careful not to overdo it and make it look unnatural or exaggerated. The result is that most of the RAW file data that could provide more details goes unused.
The “new” HDR I’m writing about here addresses this by allowing modern HDR-capable screens—especially the OLED ones where individual pixels can be set to different levels of brightness—to display luminosity the way we naturally perceive light. Instead of using colors to represent brightness, they can actually make bright areas physically brighter while maintaining vibrancy.
This advancement represents one of the most important leaps in display technology in decades, finally allowing us to take advantage of the full quality of our RAW files.
HDR is Overused
Displaying HDR isn’t a new thing—we’ve been seeing HDR content for quite some time now. Even our iPhone creates HDR images and videos by default, which you can post on some social media apps. You’ve likely experienced it yourself: scrolling through Instagram and suddenly seeing an eye-blindingly bright post. That’s probably HDR. It often doesn’t look good, and you might even dislike it.
Unfortunately, HDR is already overused, but our smartphone doesn’t know better. Its automatic HDR processing can often result in images that look overly bright, as the software tries to replicate that bright sunny sky as the camera saw it—even when that doesn’t always produce pleasing results.
This might be acceptable for casual photos, but for photography as an art form, artistic intent matters. When photographers tone images, we carefully adjust the brightness and colors, and apply what’s called burning and dodging, guiding your vision to where we want you to look by selectively brightening or darkening specific areas. Software-converted HDR undermines this delicate process.
That’s why I believe HDR should be an integral part of the toning process to fully reflect the photographer’s artistic intent. Every HDR image on Camarts was hand-toned by the photographer (me). I call it Artistic HDR.
Introducing Artistic HDR
I designed and developed Camarts with the goal of pushing the boundaries of digital presentation of photography. When it comes to HDR, I want to propose an example of how it should be achieved with two principles.
First of all, not every photo benefits from HDR. For example, if a bright sky distracts attention from the subject, it should be toned down rather than glowing brightly. If there are no elements that should be emphasized, it might as well be left in SDR format.
Secondly, I aim to keep the overall feel of the image as close to the SDR version as possible, selectively enhancing highlight areas just enough to let them naturally stand out. This approach lets SDR and HDR images visually look good side-by-side. [1]
Combining the two principles and end-to-end control of entire workflow from photography to presentation, Camarts has been able to deliver a stunning HDR experience that feels both impressive and enjoyable.
The Challenges
There are a lot of steps involved from image creation to final display on your device, and it has been a real challenge to ensure the entire pipeline [2] supports HDR—it took me almost three years to make it right.
I had to reconsider my entire workflow and rebuild Camarts’ internal tools from the ground up to make sure HDR images could flow through. Toning HDR images can take up to an additional 30 minutes per image to make it perfect. I had to invest in higher-end cameras to get the best possible dynamic range [3].
Currently, Apple’s iOS is the only platform I can confidently deliver HDR images on. Even so, it’s still a relatively new standard, and there remain issues I’m actively working with Apple and industry experts to resolve. Artistic HDR will continually evolve and improve over time.
Availability
Artistic HDR is now available as an early access feature for our club members starting from Camarts app version 2.0 on iOS/iPadOS 17.0 and later. Free samples are available for all viewers.
Since 2024, all photos published on Camarts have gone through the Artistic HDR workflow—now with over 500 available and counting. I’ll also be re-toning some of the Essential photos in HDR soon, so stay tuned for more to explore.
Apple does this by relying on software tone-mapping to convert HDR images back to SDR when they’re displayed alongside other SDR images, like the grid view in your Photos app.
The HDR images are toned using Adobe Lightroom on my iPad Pro (M4), exported in JPEG-XL format with a Rec. 2020 ICC color profile. Each image is then meticulously reviewed using Camarts’ internal tools to ensure accurate matching with its SDR counterpart, with additional adjustments made as necessary. Once finalized, another custom tool generates optimized ISO-standard HDR images in various sizes, applying branding, watermarking, and encryption—alongside their SDR equivalents. Finally, these files are uploaded to our server network and distributed globally, allowing the Camarts app to dynamically deliver either HDR or SDR versions, depending on viewer eligibility and device capability.
Yup that’s why I recently invested in a Hasselblad system, or so I told myself 😃