It’s a great time to be an avid snapper. Whether you’re a weekend hiker chasing golden-hour vistas or a selfie aficionado lighting up your social feed, Google Photos just made your life a lot more colorful. The latest update, rolling out now on Android and coming soon to iOS, supercharges how Ultra HDR images are edited—and even lets you breathe new life into older, standard dynamic range (SDR) photos.

Ultra HDR is Google’s extension of the familiar JPEG format, embedding an extra “gain map” to encode a wider range of brightness and color. On compatible displays, that means brighter highlights, deeper shadows, and richer midtones that make your photos pop in a way SDR simply can’t match. Yet despite being JPEG-based, Ultra HDR files often get flattened back to SDR the moment you tap an advanced editing tool—stripping away all of that carefully captured dynamic range.

Before this update, you could crop or rotate an Ultra HDR image without issue, but any deeper edit—be it the AI-powered Photo Unblur, the crowd-favorite Magic Eraser, or the Portrait Light adjustment—automatically dumped your picture back into SDR. Google’s own tools, finely tuned for SDR input and output, simply couldn’t handle the gain maps inside HDR files. The result was jarring: you’d invest time making pixel‑perfect tweaks only to see your highlights and contrast collapse once you hit “Save.”

The cornerstone of Google Photos’ overhaul is a brand-new “Ultra HDR” slider, tucked under the Adjust tab in the latest app version. Turn it up toward 100, and you crank your HDR intensity to the max; slide it back toward 0, and you fade all the way to plain SDR. It’s granular control that, until now, photographers had only dreamed of—no more binary on/off toggles.

“HDR photos can keep their full dynamic range and crucial HDR metadata,” Google says, “even after editing with features like Photo Unblur, Magic Eraser, and Portrait Light.”

In fact, Google has even renamed the old “HDR” slider to “Tone” to reflect its broader purpose of contrast and exposure tweaking. The new “Ultra HDR” slider sits right beside it, making it obvious which tool you’re using and demystifying the editing process.

Probably the most intriguing trick in this update is the ability to “enhance” SDR photos into something resembling Ultra HDR. It’s powered by machine learning that predicts what those missing highlights and shadows might have looked like. The app won’t fool professional graders—it has no more information than a standard JPEG—but for everyday snapshots of sunsets, city skylines, or even your dog’s snooze-fest on the couch, the results can be surprisingly convincing.

Bear in mind that truly unlocking raw-file potential still requires a two-step workflow: export your camera’s raw or 16‑bit/32‑bit SDR image as an HDR JPEG in a dedicated editor like Adobe Lightroom, then re-import it into Google Photos for further Ultra HDR‑powered tweaking.

On social media platforms that support HDR viewing—think Facebook on HDR phones or YouTube’s HDR video playback—images edited with Ultra HDR can really dazzle. But even viewers on SDR displays will notice sharper contrast and crisper detail from the gain‑map compression, thanks to Google’s smart embedding of both HDR and SDR versions inside each file.

More broadly, Google’s move sets a precedent. Because Ultra HDR is backward‑compatible with any JPEG-capable app, more photographers and developers may push to add native support, rather than settling for SDR fallback. As HDR-capable hardware becomes ubiquitous—from OLED phones to HDR10 TVs—expect other photo apps to follow Google’s example.