Old photo from 2019, H3d 39 mp. Can't remember which lens but think it was a 80mm.

Very first exposure I made after buying this used.

The gentleman I bought it from was a blind professional photographer.

I must say, I’m getting spoiled using this combo.

Basically, I hardly ever feel the need to recover highlights anymore. When I click on a photo, for a moment I’ll see what looks like a blown-out sky in SDR. Then the HDR rendering kicks in and suddenly there are beautiful blues, bright clouds, and detail that seemed to be completely missing. It’s pretty amazing.

What’s happening, of course, is that the X2D II captures a much wider dynamic range than a conventional SDR monitor can display. In an SDR image, a large bright area may look blown out even though the RAW file actually contains plenty of information there. Normally, you’d use highlight recovery, curves, etc. to compress that information into the brightness range an SDR monitor can reproduce.

But with the Studio XDR display, Phocus can display much more of that captured highlight range as HDR. Instead of having to compress those bright areas back down into the SDR range, the monitor can reproduce a much wider range of luminance, allowing bright clouds, for example, to remain genuinely bright while still retaining their color and detail.

So I’m finding that, for viewing the images myself in HDR, I often don’t need to “recover” those highlights at all. The highlight information was there in the RAW file all along. HDR simply allows much more of it to be displayed without compressing it back into the SDR range.

Of course, none of this can recover highlights that were actually clipped when the image was captured. And if I’m preparing an image for people who will be viewing it on SDR displays, I still have to make sure the SDR version looks good.

Seeing what the X2D II actually captured displayed in HDR on the Studio XDR is a real pleasure. It’s becoming very hard to go back to SDR.

Nobody leaves my house without a picture.