Are there any plans for more flexible HDR → SDR exports?

[jordan lucero]

Hi everyone! I wanted to come on here and get a bit of perspective on HDR images and make a feature request. Just be aware that I don't really know how other apps tend to handle HDR (including Adobe apps, Final Cut, etc.), so I don't know if the feature I'm describing is just a quirk of Pixelmator's implementation or not.

I'm absolutely blown away by the quality of HDR images on my 14-inch MacBook Pro shot in the Canon Raw format (CR2). Details that I used to think were just lost when I might accidentally over expose a shot were suddenly clear and visible. I love how it looks on my screen as I edit, but I kind of lose that quality when it's time to package my final edits for delivery in JPEG. The site that my school's yearbook uses demands that the images are 8-bit, which puts me in a weird roundabout of exporting to HEIC from my initial Pixelmator Pro edits, then using macOS Preview to convert that to JPEG, before sending that JPEG back into Pixelmator to touch up any problem areas. Obviously I'm not asking for the Pixelmator team to magically add details that aren't possible in standard range, but are there any plans to make this specific workflow more simple with a way to flatten the HDR effect, if that makes sense? I can sense that I'm probably misunderstanding the technology, but I just wanted to throw this perspective out there.

[9ven]

If you aren't exporting in HDR, it's probably best not to edit in HDR in the first place. It would be cool to have SDR pictures with HDR gain maps like iphone shots do though.

[Karl Dickerson]

More advanced tonemapping algorithms for HDR to SDR allow finer tuning of how the dynamic range is mapped to the limitations of SDR.

[Davey]

If you aren't exporting in HDR, it's probably best not to edit in HDR in the first place. It would be cool to have SDR pictures with HDR gain maps like iphone shots do though.

It really would. I’m guessing I’m coming up against some limitation of the software but to upload to my website (that doesn’t support HDR images) I’m having to turn off HDR for my edits as if I upload something I’ve edited in HDR it just looks blown out and terrible on the site.

At least editing in photos.app you can get the HDR benefits there and the edited exports look “Normal”, or at least indicative of my edits when uploaded, but I was shocked at how the Pixelmator HDR edits were tone mapped back to SDR. It looked terrible.

[ShaTy]

I've done the following. Use the "Convert into Pixels" on a [Raw] HDR layer in Pixelmator Pro. Then you can start to play with various color adjustments before/after to make the final output look the way you want.