HDR stands for High Dynamic Range (referring to the ability for it to capture bright lights and dark shadows), and is the biggest leap in visual technology in almost a century! The format takes advantage of the brighter and more colorful screens being manufactured in today's smartphones, tablets, and TVs.

HDR offers 3x the brightness and 30% more color than SDR leading to a significant boost in shadow detail and overall contrast.

The HDR format will eventually be ubiquitous and SDR a thing of the past, but this may take many years for this to occur.

Taking advantage of HDR now gives a significant advantage in marketing over the competition!

SDR stands for Standard Dynamic Range and is a retronym describing the previous broadcast standard following the advent of HDR.

SDR is the visual standard developed that has been the standard for decades due to the limitations of cathod-ray tubes (the technology behind those huge TV's from the 90's).

Technology has progressed and with the cabilities allowed from flat-panel LED and OLED TVs, a new standard has arrived allowing for a significant increase in color and brightness, closing the gap between the capability of human vision and that of visual display technology.

Most media infrastructure is still based in an SDR model but HDR is now seeing full implementation SDR will eventually be a thing of the past. Down the road, watching content in SDR will be akin to watching a VHS when you have the ability to stream.

This turnover is gaining fast traction but may take many years for HDR to fully overtake SDR giving a huge advantage to those utilizing HDR during this time.

HDR has the amazing ability to render an image much closer to the way the human eye sees light, allowing your work to appear to jump off the screen with vivid colors and lifelike brightness.

Your ad shows up brighter than the competitors when the user is scrolling through their feed on Instagram or by providing a direct link to your video.

HDR has a particular advantage when users are in bright sunlight as SDR images are very difficult to see in these circumstances even with their screen at max brightness.

The most utilized platforms for HDR are Instagram, YouTube, and Vimeo for embedding HDR videos on the web.

Instagram now fully supports HDR leaving your product standing out amongst others when the user is scrolling.

Youtube and Vimeo also support HDR and allow you to embed these videos on your website or provide a direct link for you to advertise your work.

You can also utilize HDR on tablets and television to product their fullest effect and allow you to advertise your works in store or in person in the best possible quality. This is particularly effective for storefronts, galleries, and trade shows.

The beautiful thing about HDR is that it is backwards compatible so when the video is viewed on a non-HDR screen it will revert to SDR.

Most platforms such as instagram have this built into their compression algorithm when you upload to their platform so you don't have to worry.

There are different ways HDR is encoded for the end user with three main formats prevailing; HDR10, Dolby Vision, and HGL.

The reason there are different options are primarily due to format wars similar to the format wars with BluRay vs. HD-DVD. Eventually one will win out but in the mean time each platform is specific to the type of HDR they accept.

Luckily, we make it simply and will make sure your HDR videos are tailored to your given publishing platform.

While HDR does have a higher brightness level, when edited correctly this added brightness should only apply to the parts in the image that are the brightest and more closely replicate human vision.

These bright videos people mention is usually someone recording a video in HDR on their phone in auto mode.

When edited correctly only the brightest parts of the image should show this peak brightness which works wonders.

Not only does the work wonders for jewelry and product photography in general, but these brighter areas allow for more colors to be visible than standard screens!