Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android 16 is implementing support for true HDR screenshots, enabling you to take screenshots of HDR content.
- This capability is live in Android 16 Beta 2 and builds upon the previous work that Google did to support HDR in Android screenshots.
- However, HDR screenshots captured by Android aren’t easy to view on other devices.
The reason most people take a screenshot on Android is to share what they see with other people, and Android can handle that sort of thing quite easily. Until recently, Android hasn’t needed to support taking HDR screenshots because the vast majority of content we access has been in SDR. With HDR content becoming more and more popular, though, people are inevitably going to take screenshots that include HDR elements. Thankfully, Google is finally adding HDR screenshot support in this year’s Android 16 release.
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What is HDR?
HDR, or high dynamic range, refers to images or videos with a wider range of brightness and colors than standard dynamic range (SDR) content. The result is more realistic visuals with brighter highlights, deeper shadows, and greater detail, making images appear more lifelike. Basically, HDR aims to capture and display a greater range of light and dark tones, closer to what our eyes would perceive in the real world.
To display HDR content, devices need HDR displays that support a wider color gamut than the relatively limited sRGB standard. While some modern Android phones and tablets feature HDR displays, the majority of content is still in SDR.
Critically, even screenshots taken of HDR content on these devices are currently saved in SDR. This is because Android hasn’t been preserving the additional color information when encoding screenshot images; with the encoding process for the SDR screenshot format, additional color information from the HDR content is lost.
With the introduction of end-to-end support for HDR video in Android 13, Google had to update Android’s screenshotting algorithm so screenshots would almost match what’s on screen. However, since screenshots remained in SDR format, HDR regions within screenshots would appear dimmer while SDR content would appear as bright as HDR content.
Android 14 further complicated things by introducing support for HDR images, i.e. Ultra HDR. Because HDR images are often displayed within SDR app UIs, Google had to devise a way to encode both the SDR UI and the HDR image in a single SDR screenshot. Because screenshots remained in SDR, Google’s solution was to brighten the app’s UI and clip HDR highlights. The end result is that screenshots don’t truly capture what you’re actually seeing.
Left: A screenshot of an HDR video overlaid on top of a Chrome page containing Ultra HDR. Right: A screenshot of an HDR video overlaid on top of the Settings app with subsequent screenshots. Both screenshots were taken on Android 14. Source: Google.
HDR in Android screenshots
In Android 15 QPR1, the operating system introduced a local tone-mapping algorithm for HDR screenshots. This algorithm both preserves UI colors and prevents clipping HDR highlights, resulting in a significant improvement to taking screenshots of HDR content. Even with the improvement, screenshots are still SDR and won’t have the full impact on HDR displays.
Left: A screenshot of an HDR video overlaid on top of a Chrome page containing Ultra HDR. Right: A screenshot of an HDR video overlaid on top of the Settings app with subsequent screenshots. Both screenshots were taken on Android 15 QPR1, which uses a tonemapper to preserve UI colors and HDR highlights. Source: Google.
Finally, Google is implementing support for true HDR screenshots in Android 16. In Android 16 Beta 2, I found that screenshots of HDR content were saved in HDR format. When I viewed these screenshots in the Photos app on my Pixel phone, I immediately saw my screen brighten as HDR highlights started to pop. I confirmed this by comparing screenshots of the same HDR image taken before and after updating my Pixel 7 Pro to Android 16 Beta 2. The pre-update screenshot was in SDR, while the post-update screenshot was in HDR.
Digging through Android’s source code, I spotted several references to a “true HDR screenshots” feature in SurfaceFlinger, a system service that plays a critical role in screen rendering on Android. When the “true HDR screenshots” feature is enabled, HDR content can be screenshotted without tone mapping.
Display analyst Dylan Raga and GitHub user ledoge inspected the HDR screenshots that Android 16 produces and confirmed that they’re PNG files with HDR gainmaps embedded in them. Most conventional tools are unable to detect these gainmaps, but a specialized PNG inspector was able to detect them. These gainmaps are what allow the screenshots to appear as HDR when viewed on Android 16 devices but as SDR on other devices.
It’s unclear why Google stuck with PNG for HDR screenshots instead of a format supported by Ultra HDR such as JPEG. Perhaps they wanted to avoid potential JPEG compression artifacts, especially when cropping. Hopefully Google officially shares more details on how HDR screenshots in Android 16 work so we can get a better idea of how to share them between devices.
