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.
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