Feature request: support for .HEIC files' HDR gain maps

[jp.ptn]

I have an iPhone 13, which can take HDR photos but not in RAW format.

When I use the Panorama function in the built-in Camera app, the result is SDR and often distorted, so on my latest holidays I thought I'd take many photos planning to stitch them together afterwards somehow. I was happy to find AP has such a feature, and was quite happy with the results.

That is, until I imported the newly made panorama to my Photos app. It was SDR, which is IMO a significant reduction in quality and prevents me from replacing the multiple shots with the single panorama I wanted in the first place. Not knowing what the issue was, I posted on these forums trying to find out what was going on, if I was doing something wrong.

After some help from your staff and going down a rabbit hole that took me to discussions on Github and tools made with Python, I found out that 1) .HEIC files do have a HDR gain map encoded as an auxiliary image, and 2) an EXIF tag needs to be set for the gain map to display properly on Photos. And even though all of this was based on unofficial data, it seems that Apple is opening up on how to handle such HDR files, as shown in a WWDC video from this year.

Setting the EXIF tag is something I can rely on 3rd-party tools for, but there's nothing I can do to about the HDR gain maps outside AP; it has to support .HEIC HDR gain maps in order to make HDR panoramas from such photos. That feature alone would make AP a front-row companion to Photos to me.

Hope such support someday finds its way to AP.

[webdove]

I second this request. The documentation says "HEIF open ⁴ Includes depth map, loaded as second layer. Depth maps are upsampled." it should also say "HEIF open does not support the iphone gain maps that render the image in HDR" so we would all understand that for the moment the iphone HDR heic images cannot be properly opened with Afinity Photo 2.