I have found that Apple’s screen capture utility on macOS to be extremely useful over the years. Amazingly, Apple has just introduced an upgraded version that allows a screen (or portion of a screen) to be captured in HDR (High Dynamic Range) format. This is a very welcome development as it provides a convenient method of creating and saving HDR images.
Rather than saving screenshots as a .PNG file, the upgraded screen capture utility creates a .HEIF file instead, which contains all the added HDR information. This is Apple’s own format. However, the good news is that Photoshop and Adobe Camera RAW read .HEIF files. Depending on what you want to do with the output file, these applications can create different types of HDR image files, such as .AVIF, .JXL or .JPEG (tone-mapped).
Here are some screenshots I’ve taken (from this website, Final Cut Pro X and Apple’s latest version of Keynote – which itself has just been HDR-enabled). Apple seems to be on a roll with HDR imaging at the moment and it’s all fantastic news. 2026 is set to be the year for true HDR photography!
