When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Especially videos which have bright sun illuminating some surfaces and other surfaces are in the shadows. It really looks like the sun is shining, I can feel the endorphin is shooting through my veins.
However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.
(a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits.
(b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255] to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them.
(c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect of (b) under most circumstances.
(c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your face.
In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
I have to agree with the iPhone camera in bright settings. It doesn’t look good.
Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my digital camera and the photos will come out really good.
It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are technically limited in capturing it.
A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you can get way better results with digital if you know what to do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.
Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2. someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.