Yueyu Hu
Sep. 9 2024
By the time this article is written, the latest Adobe Lightroom (Lr) Classic only support exporting HDR photos to AVIF (AV1 Intra) and JPEG XL. Sadly these formats are not natively supported by Apple devices and Apps like Instagram. This article describes one (but imperfect) method to export 10-bit HDR HEIC images from Adobe Lightroom Classic. This method has the following limitations:
First make sure you turned on HDR for the pictures you processed with Lr. Then you need to export the pictures to TIFF images with 16-bit depth.
File
> Export
in the top menu.TIFF
from the File Format
dropdown menu.HDR P3
works fine with me. You might want to try different ones.Export
to export the image as a TIFF file.You need a script to do this conversion.
Go to https://github.com/milch/LRExportHEIC/releases and download ExportHEIC.lrplugin.zip. (Or you can download the source code and compile by yourself if you have Xcode.)
Unzip.
DO NOT install this extension (because the author didn't add HDR support in the panel but actually the API has support.). Right click ExportHEIC.lrplugin
and choose show package content
. In the opened folder, copy LRExportHEIC to a folder you like. This is the excutable you will need to execute in your terminal.
Relocate your working directory to the folder where you put LRExportHEIC
. Run the following command in your terminal,
./LRExportHEIC path_to_output.heic --input-file path_to_input.tif --quality 0.8
.
For example,
./LRExportHEIC DSC08951.heic --input-file DSC08951.tif --quality 0.8
.
Choose your quality factor to tradeoff file size and quality. (No need to use 1.0. 0.8 should be visually lossless.)
Now you get your HEIC picture. Just feel free to delete the TIFF file.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me.
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