Your iPhone videos look great on the iPhone. Then you open one on a Windows laptop, drop it into a video editor, or upload it somewhere, and it comes out grey, flat and faded, as if someone turned the contrast down. Or the opposite: on another phone or on Instagram, it's so bright it almost hurts next to everything else on screen. Both have the same cause: HDR.
#What HDR video is
HDR (high dynamic range) video stores a much wider range of brightness and colour than ordinary video - bright skies and dark shadows in the same shot, both with detail. Every iPhone since the iPhone 12 records HDR video by default, in a format called Dolby Vision, using 10-bit HEVC. You can check in Settings → Camera → Record Video, where HDR Video is turned on.
To show HDR properly, a screen needs to be able to get very bright, and the app playing the video needs to understand the HDR information. When either is missing, the picture has to be translated down to ordinary video - a step called tone mapping. When that translation is done well, you barely notice. When it isn't done at all, you get the two problems below.
#Why it looks washed out
An app that doesn't understand HDR shows the raw HDR signal as if it were ordinary video. The brightness values land in the wrong places, so blacks turn grey, colours fade and everything looks flat. It happens in older video players, some Windows apps, video editors that haven't been set up for HDR, some web upload forms and video-call screen shares. The video itself is fine - play it in VLC, which tone-maps HDR for ordinary screens, and it looks normal.
What tone mapping does to HDR colours
#Why it looks too bright
On phones and apps that do support HDR - iPhones, many recent Android phones, and apps like Instagram that show HDR - the bright parts of the video use the screen's extra brightness. In a dark room, or next to ordinary photos and text, that can look glaring. It's the screen doing exactly what HDR asks for. Some people reduce it with Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Reduce White Point, but the more reliable fix is to share SDR (ordinary) video in the first place.
What to do, depending on the situation
| Situation | Fix |
|---|---|
| Future videos | Turn off HDR Video in Settings → Camera → Record Video |
| Existing clips, on iPhone | iMovie: Share → Options → turn HDR off |
| Existing clips, on a Mac | iMovie for Mac shares in SDR |
| Existing clips, any computer | Wave in your browser: turn on Make it play everywhere |
| Existing clips, on Windows | DaVinci Resolve or HandBrake, set up for HDR to SDR |
| Just watching on a computer | VLC tone-maps HDR for ordinary screens |
| Editing in Premiere or Resolve | Turn on the app's HDR or colour management settings |
#Fix 1: turn off HDR for future videos
Go to Settings → Camera → Record Video and turn off HDR Video. New videos are recorded in ordinary SDR and look the same everywhere. You lose some detail in very bright skies and deep shadows, which mainly matters if you edit and grade your footage or watch it on HDR screens. If your videos mostly go to family chats, social media and computers, it's the simplest fix there is.
#Fix 2: convert existing clips to SDR
- On iPhone or iPad: Apple's own route is iMovie. Add the clip to a new movie project, tap Share, tap Options, and turn HDR off before saving. That exports an SDR version.
- On a Mac: iMovie for Mac imports HDR video and shares it in SDR.
- On any computer, in the browser: drop the clip on Wave and turn on Make it play everywhere. Wave re-encodes it to H.264 and tone-maps the HDR as it goes: the brightness HDR treats as ordinary white - a white shirt, a sheet of paper - lands just under full white, and brighter highlights roll off smoothly instead of clipping. Nothing is uploaded. Expect a couple of minutes for a 30-second 1080p clip.
- On Windows: DaVinci Resolve (free) and HandBrake can convert HDR to SDR too, but both need their colour settings configured for it - search for the HDR-to-SDR steps for your version.
Without that switch, Wave copies iPhone video into the MP4 exactly as recorded, HDR included, because copying is instant and keeps full quality. It also converts HDR whenever it re-encodes for another reason, such as compressing to a size or resizing.
#Fix 3: set up your editor or screen
- Video editors: Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve both handle iPhone HDR once their colour management is set up - Premiere has an option to tone-map HDR media automatically, and Resolve has colour management settings in its project settings. Without them, iPhone footage looks washed out in the timeline.
- Windows with an HDR monitor: turn on Use HDR in Settings → System → Display so HDR video shows as intended.
#The short version
- iPhones since the iPhone 12 record HDR (Dolby Vision) video by default.
- Washed out means the app or screen isn't handling HDR. Too bright means it is, on a screen that can get very bright.
- Turn off HDR Video in Settings → Camera → Record Video to avoid the problem for future clips.
- Convert existing clips with iMovie (Share → Options → HDR off) or with Wave's Make it play everywhere, or watch them in VLC.