Apple?s ?EDR? Brings High Dynamic Range to Non-HDR Displays

“white” of Google’s home page at one brightness level, and the HDR overbrights from a video clip at a much brighter level, right next to each other, on the same display?The answer is a resounding “yes,” and the effect is both impressive and a bit unnerving. And even as they tout EDR as a selling point of their professional display and flagship iPhones, Apple has also quietly extended it to older Macs that were never advertised as being HDR-capable.From Apple’s developer documentation:Some Macs can process pixel data with a wider range of pixel values and send those extended values to the display. When you configure a Metal layer to support extended values, you can provide pixel values — and therefore brightness levels — that exceed the normal SDR range in order to display HDR content.“Some Macs” is not limited to those connected to a Pro Display XDR. In both the Finder and Quicktime Player on Catalina, the highlights in these clips should be visibly brighter than UI “white.”If the Pro Display XDR is like finding a gallery painting with its own backlight, seeing HDR pixels popping off a Mac display you’ve known to be SDR for three years is like discovering a painting that’s been hanging in your house forever suddenly has backlight button.Here’s another HDR clip happily blasting its whiter-than-white values on my non-HDR iMac Pro screen.So add a third method of displaying EDR content to Apple’s roster: On these non-HDR displays, Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR vales, should they be called for. Conversely, the lower your display brightness, the more headroom there is for EDR, although there will never be as much as on the Pro Display XDR, or even an iPhone 12 Pro.This variance in EDR capabilities across Apple devices is where a defining feature of HDR display comes into play. It’s actually trivial to display HDR content correctly on a semi-recent Mac. Apps such as DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Photo, and of course Final Cut Pro already do it, and you can expect to see it in Red Giant and Maxon tools as well.Apple sells one very expensive, very capable HDR display — and literally millions of iPhones, iPads, and Macs that are also pretty darn good at it.I’ve been critical of HDR as a creative tool.