What is HDR in photography and video: High Dynamic Range and advantages

Even if you are not a photographer, you will have seen that your mobile phone has a button in the camera application that allows you to activate or deactivate HDR or keep it on automatic. You have also seen it in the specifications when you go to buy a new television or even in the characteristics of a streaming series or movie. What is HDR and what advantages does it have? What does it mean and what does it improve?

In the next paragraphs we explain what HDR is, what these acronyms mean or how they improve our photos in the camera but also the movies you watch.

What is HDR in photography and video

What does HDR mean and what is it

HDR means High Dynamic Range or, what is the same, High Dynamic Range. The first thing we need to know to understand the acronym is what dynamic range is. In a nutshell, the dynamic range of the camera (be it your phone or your camera) is the amount or the ability to capture light and shadow in the same image. The more steps of light the camera is capable of capturing, the better the dynamic range of the camera. That is, the difference in shadows and lights that the camera is capable of reproducing. As in the specifications of your television or screen, the “optimal” dynamic range pursues deeper blacks and brighter whites, more vivid and realistic and natural colors.

And HDR is, as we’ve said, high dynamic range . We cannot get an HDR photograph if we take a single photo with our camera. We do it through post-production if we shoot several photos with different exposures to later assemble them with a retouching program that allows us to join the photo with medium exposure, overexposed and underexposed.

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Or, we do it through the mobile phone. You will have seen that your smartphone has an HDR button in the camera application that we can activate or deactivate before taking a photo. Why does the mobile take the photo with HDR and the professional camera does not? The phone does an automatic post-production of what you would do manually with an editing program: the mobile takes several photos when you press the button and in a matter of seconds mounts them, without your being aware and without your having to intervene. This achieves the greatest dynamic range. If you want to check the effect with and without HDR, we can take the same photograph by activating or deactivating this option on the smartphone and we can check the differences.

HDR on screens and televisions

We have also seen the HDR concept on many televisions today. What these acronyms show us is that the image that we are going to reproduce on the TV screen will have more vivid colors and will be more similar to reality. In addition, it is now common for us to see HDR10 or HDR10 + , the latest version of the standard.

HDR10 is an open standard (compared to Dolby Vision with very similar specifications) that allows for higher image contrast, blacker blacks, whiter whites, and a more realistic image. With HDR we have a billion colors more than in traditional televisions, for example.