Category: Uncategorized

Last week I set out to write a few thousand words on the iPhone Air, but it turns out I only need three: the lesser iPhone. Compared to the Pro and baseline models, it has fewer cameras and a smaller battery. For an extra $100, you can upgrade to an iPhone Pro and get power features like ProRAW and LiDAR. What was Apple thinking?

Every few years, Apple tests a new product category with a “wildcard” iPhone. In 2015, that was a Plus sized screen. In 2017, the iPhone X ditched the home-button and gained a notch. In 2019, the Pro introduced bleeding-edge technology at a premium price point

Some experiments flop. For years, people begged for a smaller iPhone, so Apple delivered the iPhone Mini in 2020 to lukewarm sales. I’d wager it was because, 13 years after the iPhone’s debut, we now use our phones like we used to use computers. The era of small screens is over.

From the mini’s ashes comes the Air, a phone as easy on your hands as it is on your eyes. It may be as droppable as any modern iPhone, but the double Ceramic Shield and titanium frame makes it as durable as ever.

Last week I set out to write a few thousand words on the iPhone Air, but found my mind pulled in another direction, to an iconic camera design. You may not know its name, but you know its work.

Invented by Oskar Barnack in 1913, the compact 35mm rangefinder may be the most influential camera of the 20th century.

By modern standards, early rangefinders were lesser cameras, lacking auto focus and auto exposure.

In many ways, the rangefinder is outright flawed. It’s hard to frame close shots, it doesn’t do macro, and zoom lenses don’t exist. This isn’t a camera for National Geographic. Yet thanks to its compact size, durability and stealth, the 35mm rangefinder excelled at candid portraiture, street photography and journalism.

SLR cameras addressed the flaws, winning the hearts and wallets of consumers by trading size and noise for convenience. Still, there’s something about the rangefinder that feels perfect. When compact digital cameras removed the need for film or mirrors, a decade of experimentation converged designs that resembled 35mm rangefinders, minus one important feature: taste.

In a world of consumer electronics made of cheap plastic and garish logos, the iPod proved people would pay a premium consumer electronics with beautiful aesthetics. So in 2010, Fujifilm tried a bold experiment. They designed a camera with the conveniences of a modern point-and-shoot, a fixed 35mm lens, and wrapped it in the aesthetics of the classic rangefinders.

Their X100 should have been a swan song to a bygone era. In a few years, the point and shoot market collapsed as normal people realized smartphones were good enough. The X100 debuted at $1,199, twice the price of an unlocked iPhone 4, it proved a smash hit, defining a new camera category.

15 years later, Fujifilm just launched their high-end, $6,000 variant, the GFX100RF. The RF standing for rangefinder, but this refers to its design language, not the hardware. Today, “rangefinder style” means, “a beautiful, rugged point-and-shoot with a fixed, wide angle lens.” It’s a device that functions as both camera and fashion accessory. Does this sound familiar?

The Air distills an iPhone to its spirit. While the iPhone Pro’s bevy of lenses make it perfect for a trip to the Galapagos, the Air seems perfect for street photography, journalism, and candid portraits.

Is one lens really enough? Will you miss ProRAW and LiDAR? To put this to a test, I took to New York with an iPhone Air and an M6.

The Natural Focal Lengths

Before we dig into the iPhone, let’s talk about lenses in general. Why are 50mm and 35mm the most popular focal lengths for documentary work? There’s a myth that 50mm approximates human vision. In fact, our entire field of view is technically 17mm, but visual perception is more nuanced than a single number.

Humans actually see on two levels. Our peripheral vision is very wide, but low detail. It probably evolved to spot predators out of the corner of our eye. We also have a narrow but high detail central vision, which you’re using right now to read these words. Central vision is about 43mm, which sits between 50mm and 35mm.

I’m not saying scientists met with lens makers to arrive at those numbers. Photographers probably just bought more of those lenses because they felt right. Still, it’s interesting there’s physiology to back it up.

Anyway, if you go from 35mm to 28mm, you get a little extra breathing room. It comes in handy in close quarters or wide expanses.

Of course you have to deal with more unwanted stuff in your shots.

But you can always crop to 35mm.

If you don’t know what lens you’ll need for the day, there’s a simple rule of thumb. Can you only carry one lens? Make it a 35mm. Can you carry two? Make them 50mm and 28mm.

I made the mistake only packing my 50mm for my trip to Grand Central, but the 26mm on the iPhone Air came to the rescue.

Will you miss the ultra-wide lens, a stable of almost every iPhone for the last six years? There’s an easy way to check. In the Photos app on a Mac, create a new Smart Album.

I found only three photos from the last year that make me go, “I’m glad I had that ultra-wide!” The first was the 7-mile wide Hubbard Glacier in Alaska.

The second was the exterior of the Oculus:

The third wasn’t wide at all! Don’t forget that lens doubles as a macro.

I bet I could get away with the panorama mode in Apple’s camera, but it’s a bit disappointing to lose macro. Halide may have a macro feature that works on every iPhone, but we’re the first to warn users that software cannot match a true macro lens.

If you love bug shots, the Air is not for you. But the available focal lengths are more than enough for the rangefinder crowd.

Computational Photography and (Lack of) ProRAW

Now that we’ve gotten composition out of the way, let’s talk about image quality. By that I mean algorithms.

Camera algorithms are a faustian deal. Sure, they “fix” photos, raising shadows and taming highlights, but it costs you control. Compare the earlier shot of the Oculus on film to the default shot out of the first-party camera.

I know this down to taste, but after seeing the dramatic contrast of the black and white film earlier, this all-too-perfect lighting feels wrong. It makes me as uncomfortable as staring into the cold dead eyes of generative AI.

Let me get this out of the way: I am not one of those elitists who resent how the iPhone has become Gen-Z’s gateway to photography. I’m glad we’re at the point where beginners don’t need to get bogged down in technical details like film ISO and f-stops before they can get a decent photo, let alone something you’d hang on your wall.

The issue is that “fixing” the lighting in photos means wrestling contrast from the hand of the photographer. Contrast is one of the photographer’s most powerful tools!

Apple addressed this in 2020 when they released the image format they call ProRAW. If you’re interested in its tradeoffs, we wrote a few thousand words about them, but in short, ProRAWS are not RAWs in the traditional sense. These a semi-baked version of their computational photography, with methods to turn down effects like tone-mapping and sharpening. That’s all moot in the case of the Air, as Apple restricts ProRAW to its Pro models.

ProRAW hasn’t changed much since its introduction in 2020. Instead, Apple has focused its resources on a new feature called “photographic styles.” In addition to color presets, you have access to a new “tone” control. Maybe you won’t get the latitude of ProRAW, but maybe we can match the film look?

Not bad, but there are two problems. One, unlike ProRAW, Apple has limited this control their Photos app. You can’t tweak tone in third party apps like Lightroom or Halide. The second problem occurs when you zoom in.

Notice a lack of texture. That’s because this photo was not generated from a single capture. My iPhone took a series of captures, and merged them together to improve dynamic range and reduce noise. There’s nothing you can do about this with Photographic Styles. Even ProRAWs have limited control over this, because noise reduction is a byproduct of Apple’s algorithms.

Whenever people accuse their phone of applying digital makeup to faces, or textured objects turning to plastic, this is what they’re talking about. When your annoying hipster friend goes on and on about “the warmth of analog,” they’re talking about film grain, the extra texture caused by the random activation of silver halides as light strikes emulsion.

Digital cameras may act different than film, but many people (myself included) find that the noise from a digital camera sensor adds an organic quality. The good news is that back by capturing a traditional, Bayer (a.k.a. “Native” a.k.a. “Real”) RAW. Every iPhone since the iPhone 6S supports Bayer RAW capture.

Thanks to the binning on the 48 MP quad-bayer sensor, the noise is soft and subtle. Maybe too subtle! We’ve gotten requests on our Discord for more texture, so I whipped up synthetic grain.

Anyway, let’s compare film, photographic styles, and Bayer RAW.

One thing you’ll miss about ProRAW is editing latitude. When shooting high dynamic range scenes, you can bring out details in the shadows that you don’t even know exist. Bayer RAWs can push and pull exposure a few stops, but it can’t work the miracles. For many people, that’s a serious drawback. For me? It makes things more fun.

Like every mid-century camera, classic rangefinders lacked auto focus and auto exposure, forcing you to think through every shot. They were technically obsolete by the 1970s, with SLRs like the Canon AE-1 tackled automatic exposure. By 1980s, we had auto focus.

Yet the fully manual nature of classic rangefinders still captivates camera nerds 40 years later. There’s just something about knowing that you, not the machine, took the photo. If you feel the same way, the lack of ProRAW makes the Air more of a camera-camera than the iPhone Pro.

A Camera for the Present Moment

If I could pinpoint the moment the iPhone became the definitive camera for breaking news, it was January 15, 2009.

By 2012, you’d see iPhone 4S photos on the cover of Time Magazine.

The iPhone is so important for capturing once-in-a-lifetime moments that every iPhone now ships with a dedicated capture button. But how do we test an iPhone’s ability to capture history?

Luckily, I live in a crumbling empire. Shortly before I started this review, America’s mad king assaulted the first amendment.

One hundred years later, black and white remains the best look for a nation’s spiral into fascism.

This march didn’t start as a protest for Jimmy Kimmel. Officially, this was the Make Billionaires Pay March, a protest against climate abuse by billionaires. One highlight were the paper mache effigies of Elon and Bezos.

The centerpiece of the march was the 160 foot long Climate Polluter’s Bill, detailing $5 trillion of damage caused by climate change in the last ten years.

I think the reason the rangefinder captured so many great candid moments came down to its humble presentation. It didn’t scream “Camera!” like its contemporaries.

Today, seeing someone with any sort of dedicated camera draws attention to itself. In the past this might have worked to a reporter’s attention, but today feels like a target.

If our country continues its descent into authoritarianism, the most important feature of our cameras will be security. At the moment, the iPhone is the most secure camera in the world. At the moment, you can download third-party apps like Signal for anonymous, end-to-end encryption. How long will this last? As long as we keep talking about it.

Film Intermission

The Lost Art of Building Things That Last

If I treat my decades-old cameras right, they’ll last decades more. They never beg for software updates. I never wake up one morning to find the dials changed size and shape. It makes me happy thinking of a world before software.

Yes, I’m a developer, and I can’t look away from the version of iOS that shipped on these phones. To be clear, I’m not talking about aesthetics.

I don’t think the problem rests on their designers or engineers. These small bugs seem like the same mistakes I’ve made myself countless times. Whenever they’ve slip into a release, it’s generally because I ran out of time to find and fix them.

It feels like Apple rushed things out the door to make a Fall 2025 release. With another year of work— maybe just another few months— this could have been a smash hit. Instead we read stories about battery drain, accessibility, and other unforced errors.

It’s just a bit ironic that if you hold off on upgrading your iPhone, you can wait to upgrade iOS until the bugs get worked out. The people who will have the worst experience paid $1,000 at launch for a device running a beta OS.

Whatever Happened to Leitz Camera?

The M6, launched in 1984, is widely regarded as Leica at its peak. It added a light meter for convenience, but if you don’t like it, just remove the battery. The camera remained fully functional without power.

In 2002, Leica launched the M7, their first model with semi-automatic exposure. It drew backlash for adding electronics, which left you with limited control if the battery dies. They responded with the Leica MP (“Mechanical Perfection”) in 2003, which dropped the electronics and basically backtracked to the M6.

Leica was in a bad position. While the rest of the camera industry transitioned from film to digital, Leica was stuck serving a niche fan base of analog purists. Their first consumer digital camera was nothing more than a reskinned Fujifilm point-and-shoot. They later partnered with Panasonic for compact Leica Digilux 1 point-and-shoot, which failed to pay the bills.

By 2004, Leica was the verge of financial collapse. It was saved by Andreas Kaufmann, heir to a 1.5 billion euro inheritance from his aunt. Kaufmann bought a major stake in the company and set out to return them to profitability. Two years later, they launched their first digital rangefinder, the infamous M8. The infrared filter on the sensor failed to do its job, causing ugly IR interference, a problem mitigated by recalls.

Meanwhile, the company juiced revenue by slapping its logo on everything from Panasonic point-and-shoots to Fujifilm instant cameras, and now Android phones and silly iPhone accessories. I guess the real money is in merchandising.

Let’s be honest, Leica was a status symbol long before its pivot into pure-brand. While war photographers went with Contax, artists took to Leica.

Even if the classic M was more status symbol than tool, at least the engineering justified its price tag. Every device felt like a work of art, hand assembled in their factory in Wetzler. Today, they crank out many products on Chinese assembly lines, if you couldn’t tell by the price hikes due to tariffs.

Leica’s optics used to be unparalleled, but today’s Voigtländer glass is ever just as good for a fraction of the price. In fact, every film photo in this post shot at 28mm was shot with a Voigtländer.

Influencers aside, I don’t know any working photographers shooting on Leica digital cameras. That doesn’t seem to worry the company. In their own words, they make “jewelry.”

Today, 55% of Leica continues to be owned by Kaufmann’s investment firm, and the other 45% is owned by the Blackstone private equity group. Maybe the company will continue to print money for decades to come, like Hermes and De Beers. Or maybe brand saturation will make it lose its cool, like Supreme.

Regardless, the Leitz Camera where Oskar Barnack invented the 35mm camera 112 years ago, is dead.

---

Leica earned its reputation from stellar engineering. Precise, hand assembled cameras require a high price, which accidentally made them a status symbol. It also put them in a precarious position as technology marched on.

Apple’s greatest strength in the new millennium was its lack of nostalgia or reverence. Had another company invented such iconic products as the iMac or iPod, they would have milked those designs for decades— I remember rumors that the first iPhone would feature a click wheel! Yet time and again, Apple has discontinued successful products years before they outstay their welcome, so they can make room for the next big thing.

Apple’s engineering and taste earned it a spot alongside Leica or Porsche, but this proved both a blessing and distraction. They tried to get into high fashion with a $10,000 solid gold Apple Watch, and it flopped because they went about things backwards. At launch, Apple didn’t fully understand why the Apple Watch should exist, and they hid that with marketing until customers told them, “This is for fitness.” It’s ironic that if they hadn’t shot their shot at launch, I bet they could release a gold Apple Watch today.

Apple is known for beautiful, well engineered products, and I worry they damaged that reputation to hit an arbitrary deadline. I worry about Apple losing its sense of taste, as they send tacky push notifications to our Wallets to promote a movie, and sacrifice valuable screen real estate to promote paid services.

Apple still makes the best products in world, and I still buy them, but I hope someone in Cupertino is minding this course. Their biggest threat isn’t an Android as good the iPhone, any more than Per Se should worry about Gray’s Papaya. The only threat to Apple is Apple.

The Verdict

Since it doesn’t have rangefinder, I won’t call it the modern rangefinder. The iPhone Air is the spiritual successor to the Leica M6.

It isn’t a camera for beginners, and you won’t take it on a safari, but the Air’s small size, discreet operation, and unmatched durability make it ideal for street photography, journalism, and candid portraits. You can buy phones with similar specs for half the price, but the premium pays for a beautiful piece of kit that is one-part tool, and one-part fashion accessory.

It’s a camera that distills photography to its essence. It may have less, but that’s what makes it fun. When you tap the capture button, you know that you, not the machine, took the photo.

This article may contain affiliate links.

No AI was used in this article’s production.

All product photos were shot on an iPhone 16 Pro with Halide. All street photography was captured on an M6 or iPhone Air running a pre-release build of Halide Mark III and its built-in grades.

It’s not you. HDR confuses tons of people.

Last year we announced HDR or “High Dynamic Range” photography was coming to our popular photography app, Halide. While most customers celebrated, some were confused, and others showed downright concern. That’s because HDR can mean two different, but related, things.

The first HDR is the “HDR mode” introduced to the iPhone camera in 2010.

The second HDR involves new screens that display more vibrant, detailed images. Shopped for a TV recently? No doubt you’ve seen stickers like this:

This post finally explains what HDR actually means, the problems it presents, and three ways to solve them.

What is Dynamic Range?

Let’s start with a real world problem. Before smart phones, it was impossible to capture great sunsets with point-and-shoot cameras. No matter how you fiddled with the dials, everything came out too bright or too dark.

In that photo, the problem has to do with the different light levels coming from the sky and the buildings in shadow, the former emitting thousands of times more light than the latter. Our eyes can see both just fine. Cameras? They can deal with overall bright lighting, or overall dim lighting, but they struggled with scenes contain both really dark and really bright spots.

Dynamic range simply means, “the difference between the darkest and brightest bits of a scene.” For example, this foggy morning is an example of a low dynamic range scene, because everything is sort of gray.

Most of our photos aren’t as extreme as bright sunsets or foggy mornings. We’ll just call those “standard dynamic range” or SDR scenes.

Before we move on, we need to highlight that the HDR problem isn’t limited to cameras. Even if you had a perfect camera that could match human vision, most screens cannot produce enough contrast to match the real world.

Regardless of your bottleneck, when a scene contains more dynamic range than your camera can capture or your screen can pump out, you lose highlights, shadows, or both.

Solution 1: “HDR Mode”

In the 1990s researchers came up with algorithms to tackle the dynamic range problem. The algorithms started by taking a bunch of photos with different settings to capture more highlights and shadows:

Then the algorithms combined everything into a single “photo” that matches human vision… a photo that was useless, since computer screens couldn’t display HDR. So these researchers also came up with algorithms to squeeze HDR values onto an SDR screen, which they called “Tone Mapping.”

These algorithms soon found their way into commercial software for camera nerds.

Unfortunately, these packages required a lot of fiddling, and too many photographers in the mid-2000s… lacked restraint.

Taste aside, average people don’t like fiddling with sliders. Most people want to tap a button and get a photo that looks closer to what they see without thinking about it. So Google and Apple went an extra step in their camera apps.

Your modern phone’s camera first captures a series of photos at various brightness levels, like we showed a moment ago. From this burst of photos, the app calculates an HDR image, but unlike that commercial software from earlier, it uses complex logic and AI to make the tone mapping choices for you.

Apple and Google called this stuff “HDR” because “HDR Construction Followed By Automatic Tone Mapping” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But just to be clear, the HDR added to the iPhone in 2010 was not HDR. The final JPEG was an SDR image that tries to replicate what you saw with your eyes. Maybe they should have called it “Fake HDR Mode.”

I know quibbling over names feels as pedantic as going, “Well actually, ‘Frankenstein’ was the doctor, you’re thinking of ‘Frankenstein’s Monster,’” but if you’re going to say you hate HDR, remember that it’s bad tone mapping that is the actual monster. That brings us to…

The First HDR Backlash

Over the years, Apple touted better and better algorithms in their camera, like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion. As this happened, we worried that our flagship photography app, Halide, would become irrelevant. Who needs a manual controls when AI can do a better job?

We were surprised to watch the opposite play out. As phone cameras got smarter, users asked us to turn off these features. One issue was how the algorithms make mistakes, like this weird edge along my son Ethan’s face.

That’s because Smart HDR and Deep Fusion require that the iPhone camera capture a burst of photos and stitch them together to preserve the best parts. Sometimes it goofs. Even when the algorithms behave, they come with tradeoffs.

Consider these photos I took from a boat in the Galapagos: the ProRAW version, which uses multi-photo algorithms, looks smudgier than the single-shot capture I took moments later.

What’s likely happening? When things move in the middle of a burst capture— which always happens when shooting handheld— these algorithms have to nudge pixels around to make things line up. This sacrifices detail.

Since 2020, we’ve offered users the option of disabling Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, and it quickly became one of our most popular features.

This lead us to Process Zero, our completely AI-free camera mode, which we launched last year and became a smash hit. However, without any algorithms, HDR scene end up over and under exposed. Some people actually prefer the look — more on that later — but many were bummed. They just accepted this as a tradeoff for the natural aesthetic of AI-free photos.

But what if we don’t need that tradeoff? What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?

Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers of the 20th century, was a master at capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes.

It’s even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens!

From studying these analog methods, we’ve arrived at a single-shot process for handling HDR.

How do we accomplish this from a single capture? Let’s step back in time.

Learning From Analog

In the age of film negatives, photography was a three step process.

1. Capture a scene on film
2. Develop the film in a lab
3. Transfer the film to paper

It’s important to break down these steps because— plot twist— film is actually a high dynamic range medium. You just lose the dynamic range when you transfer your photo from a negative to paper. So in the age before Photoshop, master photographers would “dodge and burn” photos to preserve details during the transfer.

Is it a lie to dodge and burn a photo? According to Ansel Adams in The Print:

When you are making a fine print you are creating, as well as re-creating. The final image you achieve will, to quote Alfred Stieglitz, reveal what you saw and felt.

I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think people reject processing your photos, whether it’s dodging-and-burning a print, or fiddling with multi-exposure algorithms. The problem is that algorithms are not artists.

AI cannot read your mind, so it cannot honor your intent. For example, in this shot, I wanted stark contrast between light and dark. AI thought it was doing me a favor by pulling out detail in the shadow, flattening the whole image in the process. Thanks Clippy.

Even when tone mapping can help a photo, AI may take things too far, creating hyper-realistic images that exist in an uncanny valley. Machines cannot reason their way to your vision, or even good taste.

We think there’s room for a different approach.

A Different Approach: Opt-In, Single Shot Tone Mapping

After considerable research, experimentation, trial and error, we’ve arrived on a tone mapper that feels true to the dodging and burning of analog photography. What makes it unique? For starters, it’s derived from a single capture, as opposed to the multi-exposure approaches that sacrifice detail. While a single capture can’t reach the dynamic range of human vision, good sensors have dynamic range approaching film.

However, the best feature is that this tone mapping is off by default. If you come across a photo that feels like it could use a little highlight or shadow recovery, you can now hop into Halide’s updated Image Lab.

0:00

/0:08

1×

In the Image Lab we have an exposure slider for adjusting overall brightness just like before. But to its right, we have a single dial that tames or boosts dynamic range. We think it’s up to the photographer to decide what feels right.

To be clear, the tone mapper works different than simply bringing your photo into an editor and dragging the “shadows” and “highlights” sliders. It also does it best to preserve local contrast.

Don’t worry: adjusting this stuff after-the-fact won’t sacrifice quality. Since Halide captures DNG or “digital negative” files, it contains all of the information that your screen cannot display. The shadow and highlight details are already in there, and the tone-mapping simply brings it out selectively.

Solution 2: Genuine HDR Displays

I went to all that trouble explaining the difference between HDR and Tone Mapping because… drum roll please… today’s screens are HIGHer DYNAMIC RANGE!

0:00

/0:10

1×

0:00

/0:10

1×

0:00

/0:10

1×

Ok, today’s best screens still can’t match the high dynamic range of real life, but they’re way higher than the past. Spend a few minutes watching Apple TV’s mesmerizing screensavers in HDR, and you get why this feels as big as the move from analog TV to HDTV. So… nine years after the introduction of HDR screens, why hasn’t the world moved on?

A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass.

Another issue is taste. Much like adding a spice to your meal, you don’t want HDR to overpower everything. The garishness of bad HDR has left many filmmakers lukewarm on the technology. Just recently, cinematographer Steve Yedlin published a two hour lecture on the pitfalls of HDR in the real world.

If you want to see how bad HDR displays can get, look no further than online content creators. At some point these thirsty influencers realized that if you make your videos uncomfortably bright, people will pause while swiping through their Instagram reels. The abuse of brightness has lead to people disabling HDR altogether.

For all these reasons, I think HDR could end up another dead-end technology of the 2010s, alongside 3D televisions. However, Apple turned out to be HDR’s best salesperson, as iPhones have captured and rendered HDR photos for years.

In fact, after we launched Process Zero last year, quite a few users asked us why their photos aren’t as bright as the ones produced by Apple’s camera. The answer was compatibility, which Apple improved with iOS 18. So HDR is coming to Process Zero!

To handle the taste problem, we’re offering three levels of HDR:

• Standard: increases detail in shadows, and bumps up highlights while giving a tasteful rolloff in highlights
• Max: HDR that pushes the limits of the iPhone display
• Off: turns HDR off altogether.

Compatibility Considerations

Once you’ve got an amazing HDR photo, you’re probably wondering where you can view it, today. The good news is that every iPhone that has shipped for the last several years supports HDR. It just isn’t always available.

As we mentioned earlier, some users turn off HDR because the content hurts their eyes, but even if it’s on, it isn’t always on. Because HDR consumes more power, iOS turns it off in low-power mode. It also turns it off when using your phone in bright sunlight, so it can pump up SDR as bright as it can go.

An even bigger issue is where you can share it online. Unfortunately, most web browser can’t handle HDR photos. Even if you encode HDR into a JPEG, the browser might butcher the image, either reducing the contrast and making everything look flat, or clipping highlights, which is about as ugly as bad digital camera photos from the 1990s.

But wait… how did I display these HDR examples? If you look carefully those are short HDR videos that I’ve set to loop. You might need these kinds of silly hacks to get around browser limitations.

Until recently, the best way to view HDR was with Instagram’s native iPhone app. While Instagram is our users’ most popular place to share photos… it’s Instagram. Fortunately, things are changing.

iOS 18 adopted Adobe’s approach to HDR, which Apple calls “Adaptive HDR.” In this system, your photos contain both SDR and HDR information in a single file. If an app doesn’t know what to do with the HDR information, or it can’t render HDR, there’s an SDR fallback. This stuff even works with JPEGs!

Browser support is halfway there. Google beat Apple to the punch with their own version of Adaptive HDR they call Ultra HDR, which Android 14 now supports. Safari has added HDR support into its developer preview, then it disabled it, due to bugs within iOS.

Speaking of iOS bugs, there’s a reason we aren’t launching the Halide HDR update with today’s post: HDR photos sometimes render wrong in Apple’s own Photos app! Oddly enough, they render just fine in Instagram and other third-party apps. We’ve filed a bug report with Apple, but due to how Apple releases software, we doubt we’ll see a fix until iOS 19.

Rather than inundate customer support with angry emails about how photos don’t look right in Apple’s photos app, we’ve decided to release HDR support in our Technology Preview beta that we’re offering to 1,000 Halide subscribers. Why limit it to 1,000? Apple restricts how many people can sign up for TestFlight, so we want to make sure we stay within our limits. This is the start of our preview of some very exciting big features in Halide which are part of our big Mark III update.

If this stuff excites you and you want to try it out, go to the Members section in Settings right now.

Solution 3: Embrace SDR

As mentioned earlier, some users actually prefer SDR. And that’s OK. I think this about more than just the lo-fi aesthetic, and touches on a paradox of photography. Sometimes a less-realistic photo is more engaging.

But aren’t photos about capturing reality? If that were true, we would all use pinhole cameras, ensuring we capture everything in sharp focus. If photos were about realism, nobody would shoot black and white film.

Consider this HDR photo of my dad.

0:00

/0:10

1×

HDR reveals every wrinkle and pore on his face, and the bright whites in his beard draw too much attention. Just as you might use shallow focus to draw attention on your subject, this is one situation where less dynamic range feels better than hyper-realism. Consider the Process Zero version, with HDR disabled.

While we have plenty of work before Process Zero achieves all of our ambitions, we think dynamic range is a huge factor in recapturing the beauty of analog photography in the digital age.

We think tone mapping is an invaluable tool that dates back hundreds of years. We think HDR displays have amazing potential to create images we’ve never seen before. We see a future where SDR and HDR live side by side. We want to give you that choice — whether it is tone-mapping, HDR, or any combination thereof. It’s the artists’ choice — and that artist doesn’t have to be an algorithm.

We think the future of sunsets looks bright.