Based on this thread, I tried Halide on my iPhone 16, One test shot over to dt, and ICK! Deleted the app. It did cause me to dig out my old Canon Rebel XT and give it a serious once over yesterday…the old images from that were so much better. It may be time to get modern…
Understand the reaction, TSANDER. To me, these Halide Raw files look like tone mapping and local contrast have already been applied, just like in a JPEG/HEIC image, but without HDR and noise reduction.
I’m going to stick with it for a while to see if I can find a satisfactory process flow in DT, undoing or modifying some of these adjustments.
I’m heading out tomorrow on vacation, and I’m bringing my old Rebel XT for some comparison photos.
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I’ve been trying out Adobe’s Lightroom for iOS. Under “Light” there is a switch to “enable editing in HDR.”
When I turn on this switch with a Halide Raw photo, the image and histogram look like full HDR. So it seems that with dynamic range scaling, these Raw files do contain information that can give photos that “HDR look.”” Bright/overexposed regions become very bright in the display.
My earlier comment about needing to be more careful about exposure may have been made a bit hastily. 
In the stock Photos app, there is no option to turn on HDR for these same Raw images.
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That sounds like what is explained in the article I linked earlier.
Hi Nis,
Yes, it’s very similar. But these were Raw images from the Halide app in “process zero” mode. AFAIK these are not supposed to contain HDR content.
So perhaps HDR refers to how an image is scaled and displayed. 
That is a bit odd, since it’s specifically the computational exposure stacking that allows for HDR in the first place.
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That’s what I thought, too. I’m sure exposure stacking leads to “better data” in the HDR range.
Here are a couple of histograms from the same image as seen in LR for iOS. The image was captured in Halide “process zero” as a raw image.
The first is with LR’s slider set to “edit in HDR” and the second has that slider off. I wish I could show how these look, bits of sky in the scene are very bright in HDR Mode.
Edit: Apple has an “HDR Gain Map,” an 8-bit luminance map, that can be embedded in images. There is also capability for a broader color map than sRGB. I’m no expert, but I think these “Process Zero Raw” files contain such data, even without exposure stacking.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/applying-apple-hdr-effect-to-your-photos