[Tom]

Just came back from a bike ride today and when I reviewed the photos I took with my Pixel 7 Pro I noticed something strange. When viewed on my laptop monitor they looked very different than when viewed in google photos on my phone. On the phone they had a lot more dynamic range, but only for certain photos, and somewhat over the top. You can see the effect happening as you review the photos. Wasn't sure what's going on but after digging deeper it seems the latest update to the camera app enabled something called "Ultra HDR" which only works when viewed on certain displays and software that supports the format. Not sure how I feel about this. I really don't want photos that look completely different on different displays or devices. It really is night and day. I was hoping there might be an option to apply the HDR effect and save the photo so it would display somewhat similar on all displays, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Just PSA before you go out and shoot a bunch of photos with your Pixel 7 or 8 with this new mode enabled. I guess it's no big deal if it only adds information, but suspect photos with this mode enabled will have less HDR than before when viewed on devices or displays that do not support Ultra HDR. https://www.androidpolice.com/android-14-ultra-hdr-hands-on/

[Wawhiker]

Thanks for the heads up. Confirmed and turned off the setting on my Pixel 6 Pro.

[neek]

Oh, interesting. That explains the "pop" I've been noticing a half second after viewing some photos - android applying the gain map after displaying the base image. Let me know if you find a way to open the gain map layer in any image editing software.

[Tom]

[Tom]

For grins I just did a test at home in a dark room with the TV on. This would typically be a challenging dynamic range scenario. Took a picture with Ultra HDR enabled. Took a picture with Ultra HDR disabled. Took a picture with Ultra HDR enabled. Then I viewed the images on my laptop (which can only display the base image). The picture I took with Ultra HDR disabled had more dynamic range than the 2 pictures with Ultra HDR enabled. Obviously need to test more to verify, but I suspect enabling Ultra HDR disables the (former) default HDR+ processing. I'm not sure you can really get that back in post processing, so there seems to be a pretty big downside to enabling Ultra HDR, to the extent you value HDR+ processing in the base image.

[neek]

I did a test as well out a window much brighter than your TV and don't see a difference. Actually, doing it multiple times showed very slight brightness difference in the shadows in both directions, but that will happen even on a camera without hdr as a result of slight exposure and processing differences. So, still not convinced, although curious as to why you'd see an obvious difference.

enabled

disabled

When I view these on the phone, there's a huge difference, especially in a dark room where the full brightness of the screen can be utilized. I don't really see a point in turning the feature off; the space savings are negligible, and in the future presumably more systems will be able to display them.

[Tom]

Thanks, must have just been lighting differences in my sample size of 1. Hopefully HDR+ is now applied in all scenarios. It's implied, but the wording is strange. I guess I could install an older version of the camera app and compare to images taken with the new version.

[Tom]

One annoying thing is if you edit the photo in any way in google photos, even a simple crop, the Ultra HDR info is removed, so seems currently you can only view the image as it was taken with no adjustments. I'm sure they will fix that over time. Another annoying thing is it's not really new, just Google's proprietary implementation. JPEG XL already has support for HDR, but google decided to roll their own and abandon JPEG XL rather than support that format. Samsung, Apple and Adobe already support JPEG XL (although not necessarily the HDR implementation): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39064820 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/17tetqh/jpeg_xl_how_it_started_how_its_going/