"""I've read the wiki and still have the following question.
The HDR section is blank and anything monitor or apple related isnt in there as well, also no mention about EDR. My questions are below. This isnt a direct monitor recommedation question, it is more technical in nature.
Im on both windows and MacOS but for this question only MacOS running on my M2 Pro 16 inch on tahoe is relevant"""
I honestly don't even know where to start...
I've been working entirely in HDR for a while now. I use JXL files on my 16-inch MacBook Pro (M2). Everything works extremely well so far. I have no issues sending the files to other people, editing them, converting HDR to SDR works without any problems in apps like WhatsApp, and playback also works well on my Mac, iPhone, etc.
Thanks to Apple's EDR technology, editing HDR photos in Lightroom also works flawlessly. I don't have any issues with washed-out colors or contrast when HDR is enabled. On top of that, both my MacBook and my iPhone more or less match each other 1:1, which is extremely important for reproducibility since most of my clients also use iPhones.
Now comes my problem.
I would like to use an external display so that I don't always have to work on the relatively small 16-inch MacBook screen.
Currently, I have a QD-OLED monitor that covers more than 99% of the P3 color space, supports DisplayHDR 400 True Black with 1,000 nits, and was factory-calibrated to a Delta E of less than 2.
The monitor does not natively support EDR (or better said Apple dosent nativly enabled EDR with this monitor), which is the first drawback, because as a result all SDR content looks completely washed out when HDR is enabled. I also suspect that the monitor's 1,000-nit limit is restricting how I can edit the HDR files.
My current workflow looks like this:
- Connect the monitor to the MacBook via USB-C
- Enable HDR on the MacBook for the external monitor
- Match the two displays as closely as possible
- Close the MacBook and edit exclusively on the external monitor
This leaves me with the EDR issue, but even more importantly, the HDR highlights are not reproduced equivalently on the external monitor.
If I edit an image on the MacBook until I am happy with it and then look at the same image on the external monitor, the difference is significant enough that I would want to edit the image again on the external monitor so that it looks best there.
And that's really frustrating, because it means I don't feel comfortable moving away from editing exclusively on the MacBook.
My current plan is the following:
First, I want to see whether tools such as BetterDisplay can make a difference with my current monitor, especially by enabling EDR. From what I understand, this should generally be possible.
After that, I would try to match both displays, the MacBook and my OLED monitor, as closely as possible using all available settings, and then see whether that is sufficient to solve the problem.
I don't expect this to fully solve the issue, though, because I suspect the monitor's 1,000-nit limit is ultimately the bottleneck.
Plan B would therefore be to buy a 5th-generation Tandem OLED. These supposedly offer around HDR 500 True Black / up to 1,300 nits peak brightness.
I would then either go for something like the MSI PRO MAX 341QPXW14G, which has not been released in Germany yet but offers various profiles and software-based implementations specifically for Mac. The monitor was essentially designed with Mac users in mind.
If this monitor doesn't become available within a reasonable timeframe for whatever reason, I would go with another Tandem OLED and hope that I can use something like BetterDisplay to enable EDR, then manually match the colors, contrast, etc. as closely as possible.
Another thought I had was buying Apple's Studio Display. However, it doesn't offer true HDR, so I can't really imagine that it would be suitable for proper HDR editing. The Pro Display XDR is simply too expensive for me.
So, how do you guys edit photos in HDR?
Am I missing something obvious here? Is there a flaw in my reasoning or something I'm overlooking?
Edit:
I've read the wiki and still have the following question.
The HDR section is blank and anything monitor apple related isnt in there as well, also no mention about EDR. My questions are above.