[HN Gopher] What is HDR, anyway?
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What is HDR, anyway?
Author : _kush
Score : 749 points
Date : 2025-05-14 12:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lux.camera)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lux.camera)
| 4ad wrote:
| HDR is just a scene-referred image using absolute luminance.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Not in the more general sense! It can refer to what its acronym
| spells out directly: Bigger range between dimmest and brightest
| capabilities of a display, imaging technique etc.
| 4ad wrote:
| No. HDR can encode high dynamic range because (typically) it
| uses floating point encoding.
|
| From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of
| standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-
| referred images and video, along with a set of standards for
| reproduction.
| cornstalks wrote:
| No. HDR video (and images) don't use floating point
| encoding. They generally use a higher bit depth (10 bits or
| more vs 8 bits) to reduce banding and different transfer
| characteristics (i.e. PQ or HLG vs sRGB or BT.709), in
| addition to different YCbCr matrices and mastering
| metadata.
|
| And no, it's not necessarily absolute luminance. PQ is
| absolute, HLG is not.
| skhameneh wrote:
| Isn't HLG using floating point(s)?
|
| Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to
| be the most standardized color space for HDR. I would
| share more insight, if I had it. I thought I understood
| color profiles well, but I have encountered some
| challenges when trying to display in one, edit in
| another, and print "correctly". And every device seems to
| treat color profiles a little bit differently.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Isn't HLG using floating point(s)?
|
| All transfer functions can generally work on either
| integer range or floating point. They basically just
| describe a curve shape, and you can have that curve be
| over the range of 0.0-1.0 just as easily as you can over
| 0-255 or 0-1023.
|
| Extended sRGB is about the only thing that basically
| _requires_ floating point, as it specifically describes
| 0.0-1.0 as being equivalent to sRGB and then has a valid
| range larger than that (you end up with something like
| -.8 to 2.4 or greater). And representing that in integer
| domain is conceptually possible but practically not
| really.
|
| > Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems
| to be the most standardized color space for HDR.
|
| BT2020 is the most standardized color space for HDR.
| DCI-P3 is the most common color gamut of HDR displays
| that you can actually afford, however, but that's a
| smaller gamut than what most HDR profiles expect (HDR10,
| HDR10+, and "professional" DolbyVision are all BT2020 - a
| wider gamut than P3). Which also means most HDR content
| specifies a color gamut it doesn't actually benefit from
| having as all that HDR content is still authored to only
| use somewhere between the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamut since
| that's all anyone who views it will actually have.
| cornstalks wrote:
| You can read the actual HLG spec here: https://www.arib.o
| r.jp/english/html/overview/doc/2-STD-B67v2...
|
| The math uses real numbers but table 2-4 ("Digital
| representation") discusses how the signal is quantized
| to/from analog and digital. The signal is quantized to
| integers.
|
| This same quantization process is done for sRGB, BT.709,
| BT.2020, etc. so it's not unique to HLG. It's just how
| digital images/video are stored.
| dahart wrote:
| I think most HDR formats do not typically use 32 bit
| floating point. The first HDR file format I can remember is
| Greg Ward's RGBE format, which is also now more commonly
| known as .HDR and I think is pretty widely used.
|
| https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html
|
| It uses a type of floating point, in a way, but it's a
| shared 8 bit exponent across all 3 channels, and the
| channels are still 8 bits each, so the whole thing fits in
| 32 bits. Even the .txt file description says it's not
| "floating point" per-se since that implies IEEE single
| precision floats.
|
| Cameras and displays don't typically use floats, and even
| CG people working in HDR and using, e.g., OpenEXR, might
| use half floats more often that float.
|
| Some standards do exist, and it's improving over time, but
| the ideas and execution of HDR in various ways preceded any
| standards, so I think it's not helpful to define HDR as a
| set of standards. From my perspective working in CG, HDR
| began as a way to break away from 8 bits per channel RGB,
| and it included improving both color range and color
| resolution, and started the discussion of using physical
| metrics as opposed to relative [0..1] ranges.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| No, it isn't. Absolute luminance is a "feature" of PQ
| specifically used by HDR10(+) and _most_ DolbyVision content
| (notably the DolbyVision as produced by an iPhone is _not_ PQ,
| it 's not "real" DolbyVision). But this is not the only form of
| HDR and it's not even the common form for phone cameras. HLG is
| a lot more popular for cameras and it is not in absolute
| luminance. The gainmap-based approach that Google, Apple, and
| Adobe are all using is also very much not absolute luminance,
| either. In fact that flips it entirely and it's _SDR relative_
| instead, which is a _much_ better approach to HDR than what
| video initially went with.
| pavlov wrote:
| Ideally in the abstract it could be just that, but in practice
| it's an umbrella name for many different techniques that
| provide some aspect of that goal.
| CarVac wrote:
| HDR on displays is actually largely uncomfortable for me. They
| should reserve the brightest HDR whites for things like the sun
| itself and caustics, not white walls in indoor photos.
|
| As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too
| much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.
| NBJack wrote:
| HDR is really hard to get right apparently. It seems to get
| worse in video games too.
|
| I'm a huge fan of Helldivers 2, but playing the game in HDR
| gives me a headache: the muzzle flash of weapons at high RPMs
| on a screen that goes to 240hz is basically a continuous
| flashbang for my eyes.
|
| For a while, No Mans' Sky in HDR mode was basically the color
| saturation of every planet dialed up to 11.
|
| The only game I've enjoyed at HDR was a port from a console,
| Returnal. The use of HDR brights was minimalistic and tasteful,
| often reserved for certain particle effects.
| simoncion wrote:
| For a year or two after it launched, The Division 2 was a
| really, really good example of HDR done right. The game had
| (has?) a day/night cycle, and it had a really good control of
| the brightness throughout the day. More importantly, it made
| very good use of the wide color gamut available to it.
|
| I stopped playing that game for several years, and when I
| went back to it, the color and brightness had been wrecked to
| all hell. I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers
| complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's
| part of why they ruined their game's renderer.
|
| Some games that I think _currently_ have good HDR:
|
| * Lies of P
|
| * Hunt: Showdown 1896
|
| * Monster Hunter: World (if you increase the game's color
| saturation a bit from its default settings)
|
| Some games that had decent-to-good HDR the last time I played
| them, a few years ago:
|
| * Battlefield 1
|
| * Battlefield V
|
| * Battlefield 2042 (If you're looking for a fun game, I do
| NOT recommend this one. Also, the previous two are probably
| chock-full of cheaters these days.)
|
| I found Helldivers 2's HDR mode to have blacks that were WAY
| too bright. In SDR mode, nighttime in forest areas was
| _dark_. In HDR mode? It was as if you were standing in the
| middle of a field during a full moon.
| xienze wrote:
| > I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers
| complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's
| part of why they ruined their game's renderer.
|
| A lot of people have cheap panels that claim HDR support
| (read: can display an HDR signal) but have garbage color
| space coverage, no local dimming, etc. and to them, HDR
| ends up looking muted.
| qingcharles wrote:
| A lot of this is poor QA. When you start to do clever things
| like HDR you have to test on a bunch of properly calibrated
| devices of different vendors etc. And if you're targeting
| Windows you have to accept that HDR is a mess for consumers
| and even if their display supports, their GPU supports it,
| they might still have the drivers and color profiles
| misconfigured. (and many apps are doing it wrong or weird,
| even when they say they support it)
|
| Also (mostly) on Windows, or on videos for your TV: a lot of
| cheap displays that say they are HDR are a range of hot
| garbage.
| the_af wrote:
| There's a pretty good video on YouTube (more than one,
| actually) that explains how careless use of HDR in modern
| cinema is destroying the look and feel of cinema we used to
| like.
|
| Everything is flattened, contrast is eliminated, lights that
| should be "burned white" for a cinematic feel are brought back
| to "reasonable" brightness with HDR, really deep blacks are
| turned into flat greys, etc. The end result is the flat and
| washed out look of movies like _Wicked_. It 's often correlated
| to CGI-heavy movies, but in reality it's starting to affect
| every movie.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The washed out grey thing was an _error_ that became a style!
|
| Because HDR wasn't natively supported on most displays and
| software, for a long time it was just "hacked in there" by
| squashing the larger dynamic range into a smaller one using a
| mathematical transform, usually a log function. When viewed
| without the inverse transform this looks horribly grey and
| unsaturated.
|
| Directors and editors would see this aesthetic day in, day
| out, with the final color grade applied only after a long
| review process.
|
| Some of them got used to it and _even liking it_ , and now
| here we are: horribly washed out movies made to look like
| that on purpose.
| XorNot wrote:
| The transition from Avengers to the later movies is very
| noticeable, and one of the worst offenders since source
| material really speaks against the choice.
| qingcharles wrote:
| What you said, it's definitely become a style. But, also, a
| lot of these movies that look like ass on Joe Public's
| OOGLAMG $130 85" Black Friday TV in his brightly-lit living
| room actually look awesome if your entire setup is proper,
| real HDR devices and software, your screen has proper OLED
| or local dimming, is calibrated to within an inch of its
| life etc, and you view them in a dark home theater.
| the_af wrote:
| True! But I think that movies adapted for TV must be made
| for the average "good quality" screen, not the state of
| the art that almost nobody owns. At least they should
| look decent enough in a good quality (but not top-notch)
| setup.
|
| Also, the YouTube video I'm thinking of singles out
| Wicked _as seen in movie theaters_. The image "as
| intended" looks washed out and without contrast.
| pornel wrote:
| Most "HDR" monitors are junk that can't display HDR. The HDR
| formats/signals are designed for brightness levels and viewing
| conditions that nobody uses.
|
| The end result is a complete chaos. Every piece of the pipeline
| doing something wrong, and then the software tries to
| compensate for it by emitting doubly wrong data, without even
| having reliable information about what it needs to compensate
| for.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A__vvTDKXt4qcuCcSN-vLzcQ...
| esperent wrote:
| What we really need is some standards that _everybody_
| follows. The reason normal displays work so well is that
| everyone settled on sRGB, and as long as a display gets close
| to that, say 95% sRGB, everyone except maybe a few graphics
| designers will have a n equivalent experience.
|
| But HDR, it's a minefield of different display qualities,
| color spaces, standards. It's no wonder that nobody gets it
| right and everyone feels confused.
|
| HDR on a display that has peak brightness of 2000 nits will
| look completely different than a display with 800 nits, and
| they both get to claim they are HDR.
|
| We should have a standard equivalent to color spaces. Set,
| say, 2000 nits as 100% of HDR. Then a 2000 nit display gets
| to claim it's 100% HDR. A 800 nit display gets to claim 40%
| HDR, etc. A 2500 nit display could even use 125% HDR in it's
| marketing.
|
| It's still not perfect - some displays (OLED) can only show
| peak brightness over a portion of the screen. But it would be
| an improvement.
| pornel wrote:
| DisplayHDR standard is supposed to be it, but they've
| ruined its reputation by allowing HDR400 to exist when
| HDR1000 should have been the minimum.
|
| Besides, HDR quality is more complex than just max nits,
| because it depends on viewing conditions and black levels
| (and everyone cheats with their contrast metrics).
|
| OLEDs can peak at 600 nits and look awesome -- in a pitch
| black room. LCD monitors could boost to 2000 nits and
| display white on grey.
|
| We have sRGB kinda working for color primaries and gamma,
| but it's not _the_ real sRGB at 80 nits. It ended up being
| relative instead of absolute.
|
| A lot of the mess is caused by the need to adapt content
| mastered for pitch black cinema at 2000 nits to 800-1000
| nits in daylight, which needs very careful processing to
| preserve highlights and saturation, but software can't rely
| on the display doing it properly, and doing it in software
| sends false signal and risks display correcting it twice.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| So, HN, are HDR monitors worth it? I remember ~10 years ago
| delaying my monitor purchase for the HDR one that was right
| around the corner, but never (in my purchasing scope) became
| available. Time for another look?
|
| The utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without
| question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with
| windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and
| looking at it on a phone or PC screen. The pic fails to capture
| what your eyes see for lighting range.
| aethrum wrote:
| For gaming, definitely. An HDR Oled monitor is so immersive.
| esperent wrote:
| I think it depends on the screen and also what you use it for.
| My OLED is unusable for normal work in HDR because it's
| designed around only a small portion of the screen being at max
| brightness - reasonable for a game or movie, but the result is
| that a small window with white background will look really
| bright, but if I maximize it, it'll look washed out, grey not
| white.
|
| Also the maximum brightness isn't even that bright at 800 nits,
| so no HDR content really looks _that_ different. I think newer
| OLEDs are brighter though. I 'm still happy with the screen in
| general, even in SDR the OLED really shines. But it made me
| aware not all HDR screens are equal.
|
| Also, in my very short experiment using HDR for daily work I
| ran into several problems, the most serious of which was the
| discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and
| expect it to look the same on someone else's computer.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...the most serious of which was the discovery that you can
| no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the
| same on someone else's computer.
|
| To be pedantic, this has always been the case... Who the hell
| knows what bonkers "color enhancement" your recipient has
| going on on their end?
|
| But (more seriously) it's very, very stupid that most systems
| out there will ignore color profile data embedded in pictures
| (and many video players ignore the same in videos [0]). It's
| quite possible to tone-map HDR stuff so it looks reasonable
| on SDR displays, but color management is like accessibility
| in that nearly noone who's in charge of paying for software
| development appears to give any shits about it.
|
| [0] A notable exception to this is MPV. I can't recommend
| this video player highly enough.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| HDR gaming: Yes.
|
| HDR _full screen_ content: Yes.
|
| HDR general desktop usage: No. In fact you'll probably actively
| dislike it to the point of just turning it off entirely. The
| ecosystem just isn't ready for this yet, although with things
| like the "constrained-high" concepts (
| https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-hdr-1/#the-dynamic-range-lim...
| ) this might, and hopefully does, change & improve to a more
| pleasing result
|
| Also this is assuming an HDR monitor that's also a good match
| for your ambient environment. The big thing nobody really talks
| about wiith HDR is that it's really dominated by how dark
| you're able to get your surrounding environment such that you
| can push your display "brightness" (read: SDR whitepoint) lower
| and lower. OLED HDR monitors, for example, look fantastic in
| SDR and fantastic in HDR _in a dark room_ , but if you have
| typical office lighting and so you want an SDR whitepoint of
| around 200-300 nits? Yeah, they basically don't do HDR at all
| anymore at that point.
| wirybeige wrote:
| I use HDR for general usage, Windows ruins non-HDR content
| when HDR is enabled due to their choice of sRGB tf. Luckily
| every Linux DE has chosen to use the gamma 2.2 tf, and looks
| fine for general usage.
|
| I use a mini-led monitor, and its quite decent, except for
| starfields, & makes it very usable even in bright conditions,
| and HDR video still is better in bright conditions than the
| equivalent SDR video.
|
| https://github.com/dylanraga/win11hdr-srgb-to-gamma2.2-icm
| hbn wrote:
| Windows HDR implementation is janky as hell. For months
| after I got my monitor I couldn't take screenshots because
| they'd all appear completely blown out, like you cranked
| the brightness to 300%.
|
| Eventually I did some digging and found there's a setting
| in Snipping Tool that just... makes screenshots work on HDR
| displays.
|
| It also seems to add another layer of Your Desktop Trying
| To Sort Its Shit Out when launching a game that's full
| screen. Sometimes it's fine, but some games like Balatro
| will appear fine at first, but then when you quit back to
| the desktop everything is washed out. Sleeping my PC and
| waking it back up seems to resolve this.
|
| I recently played through Armored Core VI, and it supports
| HDR, but whenever I adjust my volume the screen becomes
| washed out to display the volume slider. Screenshots and
| recordings also appear washed out in the resulting file.
| wirybeige wrote:
| I always thought the "Your Desktop Trying To Sort Its
| Shit Out" part was a necessary evil, but other platforms
| don't suffer from this (at least from what I can tell);
| the state of HDR on Windows is very disappointing, even
| just adjusting the TF to gamma 2.2 would make it
| substantially better. Watching all your non hdr content's
| blacks become gray is terrible. I assume the washed out
| appearance comes from it giving up on doing SDR->HDR for
| the desktop.
|
| My brother got an OLED monitor & was telling me how bad
| his experience was on Windows, & he recently switched to
| Linux & does not have the issues he was complaining about
| before. Ofc, downsides to hdr on Linux (no hdr on
| chromium, hdr on Firefox is unfinished) atm, but the
| foundation seems better set for it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Agree. Wide gamut and HDR is janky as hell on Windows. I
| have multi-mon with one SDR and one HDR and that plays
| havoc with things. But even Microsoft apps aren't
| updated. I'm pretty certain even Explorer still doesn't
| support HDR or wide gamut for thumbnails so everything
| looks either under or oversaturated in the previews. If
| you open stuff in the default Photos app there is a
| "flash of content" where it displays it in the wrong
| profile before it maps it to the correct one, too.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| HDR on desktop in windows looks straight up broken on some
| HDR monitors I've tried
|
| Like totally washed out
| 98codes wrote:
| Every few years I turn on that HDR toggle for my desktop PC,
| and it never lasts longer than a day or two.
|
| Top tip: If you have HDR turned on for your display in
| Windows (at least, MacOS not tested) and then share your
| screen in Teams, your display will look weirdly dimmed for
| everyone not using HDR on their display--which is everyone.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > HDR gaming: Yes.
|
| The difference is absolutely _stunning_ in some games.
|
| In MS Flight Simulator 2024, going from SDR to HDR goes from
| looking like the computer game it is to looking life-like.
| Deeper shadows with brighter highlights makes the scene pop
| in ways that SDR just can't do.
|
| EDIT: You'll almost certainly need an OLED monitor to really
| appreciate it, though. Local dimming isn't good enough.
| SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote:
| _IF_ you have a display that can it roughly a 1000 nits, then
| for movies and games yes definitely the difference with SDR is
| pretty huge.
|
| If you have say a 400 nits display the HDR may actually look
| _worse_ than SDR. So it really depends on your screen.
| simoncion wrote:
| Honestly, I find the extended brightness FAR less important
| than the extended color gamut. I have a ~300 nit VA monitor
| that I'm generally quite happy with and that looks fantastic
| with well-built HDR renderers.
|
| Given that monitors report information about their HDR
| minimum and maximum panel brightness capabilities to the
| machine they are connected to, any competently-built HDR
| renderer (whether that be for games or movies or whatever)
| will be able to take that information and adjust the picture
| appropriately.
| eschatology wrote:
| Yes but with asterisks; Best way I can describe it:
|
| You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the
| start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able
| to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you
| can see is so much expanded.
|
| Early HDR screens were very limited (limited dimming zones,
| buggy implementation) but if you get one post 2024 (esp the
| oled ones) they are quite decent. However it needs to be
| supported at many layers: not just the monitor, but also the
| operating system, and the content. There are not many games
| with proper HDR implementation; and even if there is, it may be
| bad and look worse -- the OS can hijack the rendering pipeline
| and provide HDR map for you (Nvidia RTX HDR) which is a gamble:
| it may look bleh, but sometimes also better than the native HDR
| implementation the game has).
|
| But when everything works properly, wow it looks amazing.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the
| start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able
| to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you
| can see is so much expanded.
|
| Note that HDR only actually changes how _bright_ things can
| get. There 's zero difference in the dark regions. This is
| made confusing because HDR video marketing often claims it
| does, but it doesn't actually. HDR monitors do not, in
| general, have any advantage over SDR monitors in terms of the
| darks. Local dimming zones improve dark contrast. OLED
| improves dark contrast. Dynamic contrast improves dark
| contrast. But HDR doesn't.
| eschatology wrote:
| My understanding is that on the darker scenes (say, 0 to 5
| in the brightness slider example), there is difference in
| luminance value with HDR but not SDR, so there is increased
| contrast and detail.
|
| This matches my experience; 0 to 5 look identically black
| if I turn off HDR
| kllrnohj wrote:
| You _may_ have a monitor that only enables local dimming
| zones when fed an HDR signal but not when fed an SDR one,
| but that would be unusual and certainly not required. And
| likely something you could change in your monitors
| controls. On things like an OLED, though, there 's no
| difference in the darks. You'd see a difference between
| 8bit and 10bit potentially depending on what "0 to 5"
| means, but 10-bit SDR is absolutely a thing (it predates
| HDR even)
|
| But like if you can't see a difference between 0 to 5 in
| a test pattern like this
| https://images.app.goo.gl/WY3FhCB1okaRANc28 in SDR but
| you can in HDR then that just means your SDR factory
| calibration is bad, or you've fiddled with settings that
| broke it.
| Jhsto wrote:
| I've been thinking of moving out of the Apple ecosystem but
| after seeing Severance on my iPhone Pro screen I feel like I
| want the keep the option to have the same HDR experience for
| movies specifically. With HDR support landing in Linux just a
| month ago I'm inclined to spend on a good monitor. However, I
| have IPS HDR 600 monitor but I never felt that the screen was
| as glorious as the iPhone screen.
|
| I'd also be interested in hearing whether it makes sense to
| look into OLED HDR 400 screens (Samsung, LG) or is it really
| necessary to get an Asus ProArt which can push the same 1000
| nits average as the Apple XDR display (which, mind you, is
| IPS).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Dunno if it's just my screen or setup but on windows I have a
| Dell U4025QW and HDR on the desktop just looks strange, overly
| dull. Looks good in games but I have to manually turn it on and
| off each time on the screen.
|
| On my Macbook Pro only activates when it needs to but honestly
| I've only seen one video [1] that impressed me with it, the
| rest was completely meh. Not sure if its because it's mostly
| iPhone photography you see in HDR which is overall pretty meh
| looking anyway.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwCFY6pmaYY I understand
| this isn't a true HDR process but someone messing with it in
| post, but it's the only video I've seen that noticeably shows
| you colors you can't see on a screen otherwise.
| nfriedly wrote:
| A lot of monitors that advertise HDR support really shouldn't.
| Many of them can decode the signal but don't have the hardware
| to accurately reproduce it, so you just end up with a washed
| out muddy looking mess where you're better off disabling HDR
| entirely.
|
| As others here have said, OLED monitors are generally excellent
| at reproducing a HDR signal, especially in a darker space. But
| they're terrible for productivity work because they'll get
| burned in for images that don't change a lot. They're fantastic
| for movies and gaming, though.
|
| There are a few good non-OLED HDR monitors, but not many. I
| have an AOC Q27G3XMN; its a 27" 1440p 180hz monitor that is
| good for entry-level HDR, especially in brighter rooms. It has
| over 1000 nits of brightness, and no major flaws. It only has
| 336 backlight zones, though, so you might notice some blooming
| around subtitles or other fine details where there's dark and
| light content close together. (VA panels are better than IPS at
| suppressing that, though.) It's also around half the price of a
| comparable OLED.
|
| Most of the other non-OLED monitors with good HDR support have
| some other deal-breaking flaws or at least major annoyances,
| like latency, screwing up SDR content, buggy controls, etc. The
| Monitors Unboxed channel on YouTube and rtngs.com are both good
| places to check.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think an OLED is basically an absolute necessity for HDR
| content.
|
| My current monitor is an OLED and HDR in games looks
| absolutely amazing. My previous was an IPS that supported
| HDR, but turning it on caused the backlight to crank to the
| max, destroying black levels and basically defeating the
| entire purpose of HDR. Local dimming only goes so far.
| nfriedly wrote:
| > _My previous was an IPS that supported HDR, but turning
| it on caused the backlight to crank to the max, destroying
| black levels and basically defeating the entire purpose of
| HDR_
|
| Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said that most
| monitors that advertise HDR shouldn't.
|
| The AOC monitor is the third or fourth one I've owned that
| advertised HDR, but the first one that doesn't look like
| garbage when it's enabled.
|
| I haven't gone oled yet because of both the cost and the
| risk of burn-in in my use case (lots of coding and other
| productivity work, occasional gaming).
| vlmutolo wrote:
| Modern mini-led monitors are very good. The "local" dimming
| is so local that there isn't much light bleed even in the
| worst-case situations (cursor over black background makes
| it particularly apparent).
|
| The advantage of LEDs is they're brighter. For example,
| compare two modern Asus ProArt displays: their mini-LED
| (PA32UCXR) at 1600 nits and their OLED (PA32DC) at 300ish
| nits. The OLED is 20% more expensive. These two monitors
| have otherwise comparable specs. Brightness matters a lot
| for HDR because if you're in a bright room, the monitor's
| peak brightness needs to overpower the room.
|
| Plus for color managed work, I think LED monitors are
| supposed to retain their calibration well. OLEDs have to be
| frequently recalibrated.
|
| And so-called micro-LEDs are coming soon, which promise to
| make "local" so small that it's imperceptible. I think the
| near-term future of displays is really good LEDs.
| mxfh wrote:
| Avoid cranking up the OLED brightness over 70% for static
| content and absolutely never drive SDR-Reds into the HDR
| range by using fake HDR-modes when having brightness high.
|
| I have a LG 2018 OLED that has some burnt in Minecraft hearts
| because of that, not from Minecraft itself, but just a few
| hours of minecraft Youtube video in those settings from the
| built in youtube client, but virtually no other detectable
| issues after excessive years of use with static content.
|
| You only see them with fairly uniform colors as a background
| where color banding would usually be my bigger complaint.
|
| So burn-ins definitely happen, but they are far from being a
| deal breaker over the obvious benefits you get vs other types
| of displays.
|
| And driving everything possible in dark mode (white text on
| dark bg) on those displays is even the logical thing to do.
| Then you dont need much max brightness anyway and even save
| some energy.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Apple's Displays yes. But I got a Phillips 4k OLED recently,
| and I'm already regretting that decision. I need to turn it off
| every 4 hours to refresh the pixels. Sometimes an entire line
| of pixels is brighter than the rest. I wiped it with a cloth
| while pixel refresh was running, and then saw burned in streaks
| in the direction of the wipe.
|
| And thats now that all the LEDs are still fresh. I can't
| imagine how bad it will be in a few years.
|
| Also, a lot of Software doesn't expect the subpixel
| arrangement, so text will often look terrible.
| baq wrote:
| I've had an OLED TV since 2017 and the answer is a resounding
| yes... if you get an OLED and use it for movies or full screen
| gaming. Anything else is basically pointless.
|
| For desktop work, don't bother unless your work involves HDR
| content.
| EasyMark wrote:
| for movies yes. for vim/vscode nope.
| qingcharles wrote:
| For the love of gods, read the reviews though. Most HDR
| displays will make the picture _worse_ not better because they
| have only implemented enough to put a sticker on the box.
|
| You have to spend really good money to get a display which does
| HDR properly.
| pornel wrote:
| HDR _when it works properly_ is nice, but nearly all HDR LCD
| monitors are so bad, they 're basically a scam.
|
| The high-end LCD monitors (with full-array local dimming)
| barely make any difference, while you'll get a lot of downsides
| from bad HDR software implementations that struggle to get the
| correct brightness/gamma and saturation.
|
| IMHO HDR is only worth viewing on OLED screens, and requires a
| dimly lit environment. Otherwise either the hardware is not
| capable enough, or the content is mastered for wrong brightness
| levels, and the software trying to fix that makes it look even
| worse.
| gyomu wrote:
| As a photographer, I get the appeal of (this new incarnation of)
| HDR content, but the practical reality is that the photos I see
| posted in my feeds go from making my display looking normal to
| having photos searing my retinas, while other content that was
| uniform white a second prior now looks dull gray.
|
| It's late night here so I was reading this article in dark mode,
| at a low display brightness - and when I got to the HDR photos I
| had to turn down my display even more to not strain my eyes, then
| back up again when I scrolled to the text.
|
| For fullscreen content (games, movies) HDR is alright, but for
| everyday computing it's a pretty jarring experience as a user.
| beachwood23 wrote:
| Completely agree. To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring
| my screen brightness settings.
|
| I set my screen brightness to a certain level for a _reason_.
| Please don't just arbitrarily turn up the brightness!
|
| There is no good way to disable HDR on photos for iPhone,
| either. Sure, you can turn off the HDR on photos on your
| iphone. But then, when you cast to a different display, the TV
| tries to display the photos in HDR, and it won't look half as
| good.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen
| brightness settings.
|
| You might be on to something there. Technically, HDR is
| mostly about profile signaling and therefore about interop.
| To support it in mpeg dash or hls media you need to make sure
| certain codec attributes are mentioned in the xml or m3u8 but
| the actual media payload stays the same.
|
| Any bit or Bob being misconfigured or misinterpreted in the
| streaming pipeline will result in problems ranging from
| slightly suboptimal experience to nothing works.
|
| Besides HDR, "spatial audio" formats like Dolby Atmos are
| notorious for interop isuues
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen
| brightness settings.
|
| On both Android & iOS/MacOS it's not that HDR is ignoring
| your screen brightness, but rather the brightness slider is
| controlling the SDR range and then yes HDR can exceed that,
| that's the singular purpose of HDR to be honest. All the
| other purported benefits of HDR are at best just about HDR
| _video_ profiles and at worst just nonsense bullshit. The
| only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter colors vs.
| SDR. When used selectively this really enhances a scene. But
| restraint is hard, and most forms of HDR content production
| are shit. The HDR images that newer iPhones and Pixel phones
| are capturing are generally quite good because they are
| actually restrained, but then ironically both of them have
| horrible HDR _video_ that 's just obnoxiously bright.
| agos wrote:
| you are right but at least in my experience it's very easy
| for a modern iPhone to capture a bad HDR photo, usually
| because there is some small strong highlight (often a form
| of specular reflection from a metallic object) that causes
| everything to be HDR while the photo content wouldn't need
| it
| altairprime wrote:
| In beta testing this morning, the Halide "HDR slider"
| works as intended to solve that. Some of my photos have
| only needed +0.3 while a couple taken in near-total no-
| light-pollution darkness have it cranked all the way to
| max and that still isn't enough.
| frollogaston wrote:
| "On both Android & iOS/MacOS it's not that HDR is ignoring
| your screen brightness, but rather the brightness slider is
| controlling the SDR range and then yes HDR can exceed that"
|
| Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness setting?
| Looking at the Mac color profiles, the default HDR has some
| fixed max brightness regardless of the brightness slider.
| And it's very bright, 1600 nits vs the SDR max of 600 nits.
| At least I was able to pick another option capping HDR to
| 600, but that still allows HDR video to force my screen to
| its normal full brightness even if I dimmed it.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness
| setting?
|
| Not exactly because it is still being scaled by your
| brightness setting. As in, start playing an HDR video and
| then mess with the brightness slider. You will still see
| the HDR content getting dimmer/brighter.
|
| It's easier to think about in Apple's EDR terms. 0.0-1.0
| is the SDR range, and the brightness slider is changing
| what the nit value is of "1.0" - is it 100 nits? 300
| nits? 50 nits? etc... HDR content (in theory) still has
| that same 0.0-1.0 portion of the range, and it's still
| being scaled. However it can exceed that 1.0. It's still
| being scaled, it's still "respecting" that slider. Just
| the slider wasn't a brightness limit as you're wanting it
| to be, but a 1.0 alignment point.
|
| The problem comes when HDR content is disrespectful to
| that. When it just absolutely _slams_ the brightness,
| pushing all of its content way past that 1.0 value. This
| is bad content, and unfortunately it 's incredibly common
| in HDR media due in part to the fact that the original
| HDR specs are very incomplete and in part because it's a
| new loudness war.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Ah, just tested with https://github.com/dtinth/superwhite
| and you're correct. I remember it not even scaling with
| the brightness, but guess I was wrong.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| >HDR can exceed that
|
| It's not just the HDR content that gets brighter, but SDR
| content too. When I test it in Chrome on Android, if an HDR
| image shows up on screen the phone start overriding the
| brightness slider completely and making everything
| brighter, including the phone's system UI.
|
| >The only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter
| colors vs. SDR.
|
| Not just brighter, but also darker, so it can preserve
| detail in dark areas rather than crushing them.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > It's not just the HDR content that gets brighter, but
| SDR content too. When I test it in Chrome on Android, if
| an HDR image shows up on screen the phone start
| overriding the brightness slider completely and making
| everything brighter, including the phone's system UI.
|
| You have an "old" style handling of HDR on Android.
| Newer/better devices don't do that (specifically those
| that support
| https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-
| hdr )
|
| Similarly MacOS/iOS doesn't do that.
|
| > Not just brighter, but also darker, so it can preserve
| detail in dark areas rather than crushing them.
|
| It does not get darker, and while PQ allocates more bits
| to the dark region HLG does _not_. And, more importantly,
| neither does the actual display panel which are still
| typically gamma 2.2-2.4 regardless. So PQ 's extra
| precision in the dark areas is ~never utilized other than
| as tonemapping input, but the resulting output does not
| have any increased precision in the darks over SDR.
|
| In fact it actually has _less_ precision in the dark
| areas as the increased display luminance range means the
| panels native bit depth need to cover more range.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It isn't just about the brightness (range).
|
| In practice the 'HDR' standards are also about wider color
| gamuts (than sRGB), and (as mentioned in parallel) packed
| into more bits, in a different way, so as to minimise
| banding while keeping file sizes in check.
| sandofsky wrote:
| While it isn't touched on in the post, I think the issue with
| feeds is that platforms like Instagram have no interest in
| moderating HDR.
|
| For context: YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos
| that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold. I
| think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log
| luminance or some other reasonable metric.
|
| I don't see this happening on Instagram any time soon, because
| bad HDR likely makes view counts go up.
|
| As for the HDR photos in the post, well, those are a bit strong
| to show what HDR can do. That's why the Mark III beta includes
| a much tamer HDR grade.
| corndoge wrote:
| The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in
| the article
| nightpool wrote:
| You are replying to the article's author.
| dheera wrote:
| > because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up
|
| Another related parallel trend recently is that bad AI images
| get very high view and like counts, so much so that I've lost
| a lot of motivation for doing real photography because the
| platforms cease to show them to anyone, even my own
| followers.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| FYI: You wrote Chrome 14 in the post, but I believe you meant
| Android 14.
| sandofsky wrote:
| Thanks. Updated.
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| > YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have
| an average loudness beyond a certain threshold.
|
| For anyone else who was confused by this, it seems to be a
| client-side audio compressor feature (not a server-side
| adjustment) labeled as "Stable Volume". On the web, it's
| toggleable via the player settings menu.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14106294
|
| I can't find exactly when it appeared but the earliest
| capture of the help article was from May 2024, so it is a
| relatively recent feature: https://web.archive.org/web/202405
| 23021242/https://support.g...
|
| I didn't realize this was a thing until just now, but I'm
| glad they added it because (now that I think about it) it's
| been awhile since I felt the need to adjust my system volume
| when a video was too quiet even at 100% player volume. It's a
| nice little enhancement.
| scraptor wrote:
| The client side toggle might be new since 2024 but the
| volume normalisation has been a thing for a long time.
| ddingus wrote:
| Yes, and I love it! Finally, the volume knob control was
| pulled from producers all about gimmicks to push their
| productions.
|
| There are still gimmicks, but at least they do not
| include music so badly clipped as to be unlistenable...
| hint: go get the DVD or Blu-Ray release of whatever it is
| and you are likely to enjoy a not clipped album.
|
| It is all about maximizing the overall sonic impact the
| music is capable of. Now when levels are sane, song
| elements well differentiated and equalized such that no
| or only a minor range of frequencies are crushed due to
| many sounds all competing for them, it will sound, full,
| great and not tiring!
|
| Thanks audio industry. Many ears appreciate what was
| done.
| ddingus wrote:
| I expected a moderate amount of heat directed at my
| comment.
|
| No worries. I've friends in various industries doing
| production who hate the change.
|
| I like it, of course. Losing the volume knob is a direct
| result of the many abuses.
| hbn wrote:
| I know they've automatically boosted brightness in dark
| scenes for a long time too. It's not rare for people to
| upload a clip from a video game with a very dark scene
| and it's way brighter after upload than it was when they
| played or how it looks in the file they uploaded.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Youtube has been long normalizing videos standard feed,
| switching to a -14 LUFS target in 2019. But LUFS is a
| global target, and is meant to allow higher peaks and
| troughs over the whole video, and the normalization does
| happen on a global level - if you exceed it by 3dB, then
| the whole video gets it's volume lowered by 3dB, no matter
| if the part is quiet or not.
|
| The stable volume thing is meant to essentially level out
| all of the peaks and troughs, and IIRC it's actually
| computed server-side, I think yt-dlp can download stable
| volume streams if asked to.
| spoonsort wrote:
| Why is nobody talking about the standards development? They
| (OS, image formats) could just say all stuff by default
| assumes SDR and if a media file explicitly calls for HDR even
| then it cannot have sharp transitions except in special
| cases, and the software just blocks or truncates any non
| conforming images. The OS should have had something like this
| for sound, about 25-30 years ago. For example a brightness
| aware OS/monitor combo could just outright disallow anything
| about x nits. And disallow certain contrast levels, in the
| majority of content.
| altairprime wrote:
| Instagram has to allow HDR for the same reason that Firefox
| spent the past twenty years displaying web colors like HN
| orange at maximum display gamut rather than at sRGB
| calibrated: because a brighter red than anyone else's draws
| people in, and makes the competition seem lifeless by
| comparison, especially in a mixed-profiles environment.
| _Eventually_ that is regarded as 'garishly bright', so to
| speak, and people push back against it. I assume Firefox is
| already fixing this to support the latest CSS color spec
| (which defines #rrggbb as sRGB and requires it to be
| presented as such unless stated otherwise in CSS), but I
| doubt Instagram is willing to literally dim their feed;
| instead, I would expect them to begin AI-HDR'ing SDR uploads
| in order that all videos are captivatingly, garishly, bright.
| mrandish wrote:
| > I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based
| on log luminance or some other reasonable metric.
|
| I completely understand the desire to address the issue of
| content authors misusing or intentionally abusing HDR with
| some kind of auto-limiting algorithm similar to the way the
| radio 'loudness wars' were addressed. Unfortunately, I
| suspect it will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve
| without also negatively impacting some content applying HDR
| correctly for artistically expressive purposes. Static photos
| may be solvable without excessive false positive over-
| correction but cinematic video is much more challenging due
| to the dynamic nature of the content.
|
| As a cinemaphile, I'm starting to wonder if maybe HDR on
| mobile devices simply isn't a solvable problem in practice.
| While I think it's solvable technically and certainly
| addressable from a standards perspective, the reality of
| having so many stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem
| (hardware, OS, app, content distributors, original creators)
| with diverging priorities makes whatever we do from a base
| technology and standards perspective unlikely to work in
| practice for most users. Maybe I'm too pessimistic but as a
| high-end home theater enthusiast I'm continually dismayed how
| hard it is to correctly display diverse HDR content from
| different distribution sources in a less complex ecosystem
| where the stakeholders are more aligned and the leading
| standards bodies have been around for many decades (SMPTE et
| al).
| amlib wrote:
| I believe everything could be solved the same way we solved
| high dynamic range in audio, with a volume control.
|
| I find it pretty weird that all tvs and most monitors hide
| the brightness adjustment under piles and piles of menus
| when it could be right there in the remote alongside the
| sound volume buttons. Maybe phones could have hardware
| brightness buttons too, at least something as easy as it is
| on adjusting brightness in notebooks that have dedicated
| brightness fn buttons.
|
| Such brightness slider could also control the amount of
| tonemapping applied to HDR content. High brightness would
| mean no to low tonemapping and low brightness would use a
| very agressive tonemapper producing a similar image to the
| SDR content along it.
|
| Also note that good audio volume attenuation requires
| proper loudness contour compensation (as you lower the
| volume you also increase the bass and treble) for things to
| sound reasonably good and the "tone" sound well balanced.
| So, adjusting the tonemapping based on the brightness isn't
| that far off what we do with audio.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Btw, YouTube doesn't moderate HDR either. I saw one video of
| a child's violin recital that was insanely bright, and
| probably just by accident of using a bad HDR recorder.
| hypeatei wrote:
| This happens on Snapchat too with HDR videos. Brightness
| increases while everything else dims... including the buttons.
| skhameneh wrote:
| I'm under the impression this is caused by the use of "HDR
| mode"(s) and poor adaptive brightness implementations on
| devices. Displays such as the iPad Pro w/ OLED are phenomenal
| and don't seem to implement an overactive adaptive brightness.
| HDR content has more depth without causing brightness
| distortion.
|
| In contrast, my TV will change brightness modes to display HDR
| content and disables some of the brightness adjustments when
| displaying HDR content. It can be very uncomfortably bright in
| a dark room while being excessively dim in a bright room. It
| requires adjusting settings to a middle ground resulting in a
| mixed/mediocre experience overall. My wife's laptop is the
| worst of all our devices, while reviews seem to praise the
| display, it has an overreactive adaptive brightness that cannot
| be disabled (along with decent G2G response but awful B2W/W2B
| response that causes ghosting).
| altairprime wrote:
| Apple's method involves a good deal of what they call "EDR",
| wherein the display gamma is ramped down in concert with
| ramping the brightness up, so that the brighter areas get
| brighter while the non-bright areas remain dark due to gamma
| math; that term is helpful for searching their WWDC developer
| videos for more details.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It still looks like how they say where its way too bright
| and makes formerly "bright" whites appear even neutral grey
| surrounding the hdr content. Personally I find it extremely
| jarring when it is just a frame that is hdr within the
| overall screen. It is much nicer when the hdr content is
| full screen. Imo I wish I could just disable partial screen
| hdr and keep the full screen implementation because it is
| that distracting.
| altairprime wrote:
| Out curiosity -- I don't have Instagram to test and this
| is a perceptual question anyways -- if you enable iOS
| Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce White Point
| (25%) and increase the screen brightness slightly to
| compensate for the slight dimness; does that reduce or
| eliminate the 'jarring'ness?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'm talking about my macbook and that would be untenable
| because it needs max brightness on non hdr content in a
| daylight lit room.
| dmos62 wrote:
| That's not inherent to HDR though. BFV (unless I'm confusing it
| with something else) has a HDR adjustment routine where you
| push a slider until the HDR white and the SDR white are
| identical. Same could be done for desktop environments. In my
| experience, HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. You can't
| even play Dolby Vision on Windows, which is the only widely-
| used HDR format with dynamic metadata.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm.
|
| I think it's because no one wants it.
| altairprime wrote:
| No; Windows 10 barely supports it, and of my hundreds of
| Steam games, exactly none have any code making use of it;
| seemingly only AAA mega-budget games have the pipeline
| bandwidth, but e.g. Dune Imperium and Spaceways have no
| reason to use it and so don't bother. Windows 11 focused on
| improving wide color support which is much more critical,
| as any game shipping for Mac/Win already has dealt with
| that aspect of the pipeline and has drabified their game
| for the pre-Win11 ICC nightmares. Even games like Elite
| Dangerous, which would be a top candidate for both HDR
| _and_ wide color, don't handle this yet; their pipeline is
| years old and I don't envy them the work of trying to
| update it, given how they're overlaying the in-game UI in
| the midst of their pipeline.
|
| (It doesn't help that Windows only allows HDR to be defined
| in EDID and monitor INF files, and that PC monitors start
| shutting off calibration features when HDR is enabled
| because their chipsets can't keep up -- just as most modern
| Sony televisions can't do both Dolby Vision _and_ VRR
| because that requires too much processing power for their
| design budget.)
| Suppafly wrote:
| Nothing you're written disproves that no one wants it, if
| anything the fact that nothing really supports it implies
| that it's not a valuable feature that people are
| clamoring for.
| altairprime wrote:
| Given how popular it is in modern console AAA gaming,
| which many people _do_ play on PCs, one can reasonably
| expect that any studio desiring to target high contrast
| gaming -- a valuable niche for stealth games, where a
| bright torch should absolutely stand out brightly against
| the darkest shadows, as well as star exploration and
| anything with landscapes or specular highlights -- would
| _like_ to be targeting HDR on PC, if only to simplify
| their cross-platform build and test pipelines, but cannot
| due to platform barriers that don't exist for consoles.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Given how popular it is in modern console AAA gaming
|
| What are some of the games where it's necessary?
| altairprime wrote:
| You'll have to do that research yourself, apologies; I
| haven't looked for that data and so I don't have it
| available for you.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's an absolute mess on Windows. It's one area where I
| totally bow to Apple's vertical integration which makes
| this stuff flawless.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I want it. And, I'm hardpressed to imagine a multimedia
| consumer that doesn't care about color and brightness
| ranges, unless they don't understand what that is. Every
| movie is recorded and many phones now capture in a range
| that can't be encoded in 8-bits.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you mean https://i.imgur.com/0LtYuDZ.jpeg that is probably
| the slider GP wants but it's not about matching HDR white to
| SDR white, it's just about clamping the peak HDR brightness
| in its own consideration. The white on the left is the HDR
| brightness according to a certain value in nits set via the
| bottom slider. The white on the right is the maximally bright
| HDR signal. The goal of adjusting the slider is to find how
| bright of an HDR white your display can actually produce,
| which is the lowest slider value at which the two whites
| appear identical to a viewer.
|
| Some games also have a separate slider
| https://i.imgur.com/wenBfZY.png for adjusting "paper white",
| which is the HDR white one might normally associate with
| matching to SDR reference white (100 nits when in a dark room
| according to the SDR TV color standards, higher in other
| situations or standards). Extra note: the peak brightness
| slider in this game (Red Dead Redemption 2) is the same knob
| as the brightness slider in the above Battlefield V
| screenshot)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying this!
| zamadatix wrote:
| On the browser spec side this is just starting to get
| implemented as a CSS property https://caniuse.com/mdn-
| css_properties_dynamic-range-limit so I expect it might start
| to be a more common thing in web tech based feeds given time.
| casey2 wrote:
| This seems more like a "your feeds" problem than an HDR
| problem. Much in the same way people screencap and convert
| images willy nilly. I suggest blocking non HDR content
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I experience the same thing you do -- but my take on it is
| different. Being hit with HDR images (and videos on YouTube),
| while unsettling, makes me then realize how just damned dull
| the SDR world I had been forced to succumb to has been.
|
| Let the whole experience be HDR and perhaps it won't be
| jarring.
| echo_time wrote:
| Note for Firefox users - view the page in Chrome to see more of
| what they are talking about. I was very confused by some of the
| images, and it was a world of difference when I tried again in
| Chrome. Things began to make a lot more sense - is there a flag I
| am missing in Firefox on the Mac?
| viraptor wrote:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr there's the
| tracking issue for HDR support.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Tbh, I'm glad this isn't supported in Firefox as of right now
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Can confirm on Windows 11 with HDR enabled on my display-- I
| see the photos in the article correctly on Chrome and they're a
| grey mess on Firefox.
| lloeki wrote:
| On macOS even without HDR enabled on my display there's a
| striking difference due to better tone mapping between Safari
| and Firefox.
|
| If I enable HDR the Firefox ones become a gray mess vs the
| lights feeling like actual lights in Safari.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| For what it's worth, your comment has me convinced I just
| "can't see" HDR properly because I have the same page side-by-
| side on Firefox and Chrome on my M4 MBP and honestly? Can't see
| the difference.
|
| edit: Ah, nevermind. It seems Firefox is doing some sort of
| post-processing (maybe bad tonemapping?) on-the-fly as the
| pictures start out similar but degrade to washed out after some
| time. In particular, the "OVERTHROW BOXING CLUB" photo makes
| this quite apparent.
|
| That's a damn shame Firefox. C'mon, HDR support feels like
| table stakes at this point.
|
| edit2: Apparently it's not table stakes.
|
| > Browser support is halfway there. Google beat Apple to the
| punch with their own version of Adaptive HDR they call Ultra
| HDR, which Chrome 14 now supports. Safari has added HDR support
| into its developer preview, then it disabled it, due to bugs
| within iOS.
|
| at which point I would just say to `lux.camera` authors - why
| not put a big fat warning at the top for users with a Firefox
| or Safari (stable) browser? With all the emphasis on supposedly
| simplifying a difficult standard, the article has fallen for
| one of its most famous pitfalls.
|
| "It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people."
|
| Yep, and you've made it even worse for a huge chunk of people.
| :shrug: Great article n' all just saying.
| cubefox wrote:
| HDR support in Chrome (Android) looks still broken for me. For
| one, some of the images on the blog have a posterization
| effect, which is clearly wrong.
|
| Second, the HDR effect seems to be implemented in a very crude
| way, which causes the whole Android UI (including the Android
| status bar at the top) to become brighter when HDR content is
| on screen. That's clearly not right. Though, of course, this
| might also be some issue of Android rather than Chrome, or
| perhaps of the Qualcomm graphics driver for my Adreno GPU, etc.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Yeah, the HDR videos on my Asus Zenfone 9 (on Android 14)
| look like really terrible.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| Which Android phone are you using?
| cubefox wrote:
| This one:
| https://gsmarena.com/motorola_edge_30_ultra-11206.php
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I wasn't using Firefox, but I had the page open on an old
| monitor. I dragged the page to an HDR display and the images
| pop.
| sebstefan wrote:
| For the Halide's updated Image Lab demo about 2/3rd of the way
| down the page
| (https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-
| tr...), you made the demo so tall desktop users can't both see
| the sky & the controls at the same time
|
| A lot of these design flaws are fixed by Firefox's picture in
| picture option but for some reason, with the way you coded it,
| the prompt to pop it out as PIP doesn't show up
| esperent wrote:
| This page crashed Brave on Android three times before I gave up.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| For me this crashed in android webview, android chrome, and
| android firefox. Impressive.
| mxfh wrote:
| Does anyone else find the hubris in the first paragraph writing
| as off-putting as I do?
|
| "we finally explain what HDR actually means"
|
| Then spends 2/3rds of the article on a _tone mapping_ expedition,
| only to not address the elephant in the room, that is the almost
| complete absence of predictable color management in consumer-
| grade digital environments.
|
| UIs are hardly ever tested in HDR: I don't want my subtitles to
| burn out my eyes in actual HDR display.
|
| It is here, where you, the consumer, are as vulnerable to light
| in a proper dark environment for movie watching, as when raising
| the window curtains on a bright summer morning. (That brightness
| abuse by content is actually discussed here)
|
| Dolby Vision and Apple have the lead here as a closed platforms,
| on the web it's simply not predictably possible yet.
|
| Best hope is the efforts of the Color on the Web Community Group
| from my impression.
|
| https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG
| lordleft wrote:
| Isn't that the point of the article? That the colloquial
| meaning of HDR is quite overloaded, and when people complain
| about HDR, they mean bad tone-mapping? I say this as someone as
| close to totally ignorant about photography as you can get; I
| personally thought the article was pretty spectacular.
| mort96 wrote:
| When I complain about HDR it's because I've intentionally set
| the brightness of pure white to a comfortable level, and then
| suddenly parts of my screen are brighter than that. You
| fundamentally can't solve that problem with just better tone
| mapping, can you?
| Retr0id wrote:
| You can for some definition of "solve", by tone-mapping all
| HDR content back down into an SDR range for display.
| mort96 wrote:
| Well yeah. I considered adding that caveat but elected
| not to because it's obvious and doesn't add anything to
| the conversation, since that's obviously not what's meant
| when the industry talks about "HDR". Should've remembered
| this is HN.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The bit about "confused" turns me off right away. The kind of
| high-pressure stereo salesman who hopes I am the kind of
| 'audiophile' who prevents me from calling myself an
| 'audiophile' (wants mercury-filled cables for a more 'fluid'
| sound) always presupposes the reader/listener is "confused".
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| But it's not the colloquial meaning, HDR is fairly well
| defined by e.g. ITU-R BT.2100, which addresses colorimetry,
| luminance and the corresponding transfer functions.
| sandofsky wrote:
| I don't think that's the colloquial meaning. If you asked
| 100 people on the street to describe HDR, I doubt a single
| person would bring up ITU-R BT.2100.
| babypuncher wrote:
| HDR has a number of different common meanings, which adds
| to the confusion.
|
| For example, in video games, "HDR" has been around since
| the mid '00s, and refers to games that render a wider
| dynamic range than displays were capable of, and use
| post-process effects to simulate artifcats like bloom and
| pupil dilation.
|
| In photography, HDR has almost the opposite meaning of
| what it does everywhere else. Long and multiple exposures
| are combined to create an image that has very little
| contrast, bringing out detail in a shot that would
| normally be lost in shadows or to overexposure.
| altairprime wrote:
| Photography's meaning is also about a hundred years older
| than video games; high(er) dynamic range was a concern in
| film processing as far back as Ansel, if not prior. That
| technology adopted it as a sales keyword is interesting
| and it's worth keeping in mind when writing for an
| audience -- but this post is about a photography app, not
| television content or video games, so one can reasonably
| expect photography's definition to be used, even if the
| audience isn't necessarily familiar.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I think you may be operating with an idiosyncratic
| definition of "colloquial"
| redczar wrote:
| Colloquial meaning and the well defined meaning are two
| different things in most cases, right?
| Diti wrote:
| They also make no mention of transfer functions, which is the
| main mechanism which explains why the images "burn your eyes" -
| content creators should use HLG (which has relative luminance)
| and not PQ (which has absolute luminance) when they create HDR
| content for the web.
| sandofsky wrote:
| In theory PQ specifies absolute values, but in practice it's
| treated as relative. Go load some PQ encoded content on an
| iPhone, adjust your screen brightness, and watch the HDR
| brightness also change. Beyond the iPhone, it would be
| ridiculous to render absolute values as-is, given SDR white
| is supposedly 100-nits; that would be unwatchable in most
| living rooms.
|
| Bad HDR boils down to poor taste and the failure of platforms
| to rein it in. You can't fix bad HDR by switching encodings
| any more than you can fix global warming by switching from
| Fahrenheit to Celsius.
| klausa wrote:
| It's a blog for a (fancy) iPhone camera app.
|
| Color management and handling HDR in UIs is probably a bit out
| of scope.
| sandofsky wrote:
| > Does anyone else find the hubris in the first paragraph
| writing as off-putting as I do? > "we finally explain what HDR
| actually means"
|
| No. Because it's written for the many casual photographers
| we've spoken with who are confused and asked for an explainer.
|
| > Then spends 2/3rds of the article on a tone mapping
| expedition, only to not address the elephant in the room, that
| is the almost complete absence of predictable color management
| in consumer-grade digital environments.
|
| That's because this post is about HDR and not color management,
| which is different topic.
| klausa wrote:
| >No. Because it's written for the many casual photographers
| we've spoken with who are confused and asked for an
| explainer.
|
| To be fair, it would be pretty weird if you found your own
| post off-putting :P
| mullingitover wrote:
| Me, routinely, reading things I wrote a while ago: what is
| this dreck
| mxfh wrote:
| Maybe my response was part of the broader HDR symptom--that
| the acronym is overloaded with different meanings depending
| on where you're coming from.
|
| On the HN frontpage, people are likely thinking of one of at
| least three things:
|
| HDR as display tech (hardware)
|
| HDR as wide gamut data format (content)
|
| HDR as tone mapping (processing)
|
| ...
|
| So when the first paragraph says _we finally explain what HDR
| actually means_ , it set me off on the wrong foot--it comes
| across pretty strongly for a term that's notoriously context-
| dependent. Especially in a blog post that reads like a
| general explainer rather than a direct Q&A response when not
| coming through your apps channels.
|
| Then followed up by _The first HDR is the "HDR mode"
| introduced to the iPhone camera in 2010._ caused me to write
| the comment.
|
| For people over 35 with even the faintest interest in
| photography, the first exposure to the _HDR_ acronym probably
| didn't arrive with the iPhone in 2010, but _HDR_ IS
| equivalent to _Photomatix_ style tone mapping starting in
| 2005 as even mentioned later. The ambiguity of the term is a
| given now. I think it 's futile to insist or police one
| meaning other the other in non-scientific informal
| communication, just use more specific terminology.
|
| So the correlation of what _HDR_ means or what sentiment it
| evokes in people by age group and self-assesed photography
| skill might be something worthwhile to explore.
|
| The post get's a lot better after that. That said, I really
| did enjoy the depth. The dive into the classic dodge and burn
| and the linked YouTube piece. One explainer at a time makes
| sense--and tone mapping is a good place to start. Even tone
| mapping is fine in moderation :)
| ddingus wrote:
| I took the post about the same way. Thought it excellent
| because of depth.
|
| Often, we don't get that and this topic, plus my relative
| ignorance on it, welcomed the post as written.
| mxfh wrote:
| Just out of curiosity since your profile suggests your
| from an older cohort. Do you actively remember the
| Pixelmatix tone mapping era, or where you already old
| enough to see this as a passing fad, or was this a more
| niche thing than I remember?
|
| Now I even remember the 2005 HDR HL2 Lost Coast Demo was
| a thing 20 years ago: https://bit-
| tech.net/previews/gaming/pc/hl2_hdr_overview/1/
| ddingus wrote:
| I was old enough to see it as the passing fad it was.
|
| Niche, style points first kind of thing for sure.
|
| Meta: old enough that getting either a new color not
| intended, or an additional one visible on screen and
| having the machine remain able to perform was a big deal.
| mxfh wrote:
| I missed the MDA/EGA/CGA/Hercules era and jumped right
| into glorious VGA. Only start options for some DOS-games
| informed you about that drama in the mid 90s not having
| any idea what that meant otherwise.
| mrandish wrote:
| > "The first HDR is the "HDR mode" introduced to the iPhone
| camera in 2010."
|
| Yeah, I had a full halt and process exception on that line
| too. I guess all the research, technical papers and
| standards development work done by SMPTE, Kodak, et al in
| the 1990s and early 2000s just didn't happen? Turns out
| Apple invented it all in 2010 (pack up those Oscars and
| Emmys awarded for technical achievement and send'em back
| boys!)
| mrandish wrote:
| > That's because this post is about HDR
|
| It's about HDR from the perspective of still photography, in
| your app, on iOS, in the context of hand-held mobile devices.
| The post's title ("What Is HDR, Anyway?"), content level and
| focus would be appropriate in the context of your company's
| social media feeds for users of your app - which is probably
| the audience and context it was written for. However in the
| much broader context of HN, a highly technical community
| whose interests in imaging are diverse, the article's content
| level and narrow focus aren't consistent with the headline
| title. It seems written at a level appropriate for novice
| users.
|
| If this post was titled "How does Halide handle HDR, anyway?"
| or even "How should iOS photo apps handle HDR, anyway?" I'd
| have no objection about the title's promise not matching the
| content _for the HN audience_. When I saw the post 's
| headline I thought " _Cool!_ We really need a good technical
| deep dive into the mess that is HDR - including tech, specs,
| standards, formats, content acquisition, distribution and
| display across content types including stills, video clips
| and cinematic story-telling and diverse viewing contexts from
| phones to TVs to cinemas to VR. " When I started reading and
| the article only used photos to illustrate concepts best
| conveyed with color gradient graphs PLUS photos, I started to
| feel duped by the title.
|
| (Note: I don't use iOS or your app but the photo comparison
| of the elderly man near the end of the article confused me.
| From my perspective (video, cinematography and color
| grading), the "before" photo looks like a raw capture with
| flat LUT (or no LUT) applied. Yet the text seemed to imply
| Halide's feature was 'fixing' some problem with the image.
| Perhaps I'm misunderstanding since I don't know the tool(s)
| or workflow but I don't see anything wrong with the original
| image. It's what you want in a flat capture for later
| grading.)
| haswell wrote:
| > _However in the much broader context of HN, a highly
| technical community whose interests in imaging are diverse,
| the article 's content level and narrow focus aren't
| consistent with the headline title. It seems written at a
| level appropriate for novice users._
|
| That is hardly the fault of the authors though. The article
| seems entirely appropriate for its intended audience, and
| they can't control who posts it on a site like HN.
| willquack wrote:
| > That brightness abuse by content
|
| I predict HDR content on the web will eventually be disabled or
| mitigated on popular browsers similarly to how auto-playing
| audio content is no longer allowed [1]
|
| Spammers and advertisers haven't caught on yet to how abusively
| attention grabbing eye-searingly bright HDR content can be, but
| any day now they will and it'll be everywhere.
|
| 1. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/firefox-66-to-block-
| automa...
| babypuncher wrote:
| This seems like a fairly easy problem to solve from a UX
| standpoint, even moreso than auto-playing audio/video.
| Present all pages in SDR by default, let the user click a
| button on the toolbar or url bar to toggle HDR rendering when
| HDR content is detected.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| They haven't, but influencers certainly have, I get regular
| still images which are rendered as a video to get the HDR
| brightness boost in Instagram, etc.
| srameshc wrote:
| I on the other hand never thought or cared about HDR much
| before but I remember seeing it everywhere. But I feel the
| article explains well and clearly with examples, for someone
| like me who isn't much camera literate.
| altairprime wrote:
| It seems fine to me. Made sense on the first read and matches
| my experiences with OpenEXR and ProPhoto RGB and pre-Apple
| monitors.
|
| High dynamic resolution has always been about tone mapping.
| Post-sRGB color profile support is called "Wide color" these
| days, has been available for twenty years or more on all DSLR
| cameras (such as Nikon ProPhoto RGB supported in-camera on my
| old D70), and has nothing to do with the dynamic range and tone
| mapping of the photo. It's convenient that we don't have to use
| EXR files anymore, though!
|
| An HDR photo in sRGB will have the same defects beyond peak
| saturation at any given hue point, as an SDR photo in sRGB
| would, relative to either in DCI-P3 or ProPhoto. Even a two-bit
| black-or-white "what's color? on or off pixels only" HyperCard
| dithered image file can still be HDR or SDR. In OKLCH, the
| selected luminosity will _also_ impact the available chroma
| range; at some point you start spending your new post-sRGB peak
| chroma on luminosity instead; but the exact characteristic of
| that tradeoff at any given hue point is defined by the color
| profile algorithm, not by whether the photo is SDR or HDR, and
| the highest peak saturation possible for each hue is fixed,
| whatever luminosity it happens to be at.
| thfuran wrote:
| It may not be the best explanation, but I think any explanation
| of HDR beyond a sentence or two of definition that doesn't
| mention the mess that is tone mapping is entirely remiss.
| frollogaston wrote:
| It's nonsense that an image/video gets to override my screen
| brightness, end of story. I want that removed, not even a
| setting, just gone.
|
| The photo capture HDR is good. That's a totally different thing
| and shouldn't have had its name stolen.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Just one other thing. In Analog you also have compensating
| developers, which will exhaust faster in darker areas (or lighter
| if you think in negative), and allow for lighter areas more time
| to develop and show, and hence some more control of the range.
| Same but to less degree with stand development which uses very
| low dilutions of the developer, and no agitation. So dodging and
| burning is not the only way to achieve higher dynamic range in
| analog photos.
|
| About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography.
| No more shadows and highlights. I find they are good at capturing
| family moments, but not as a creative tool.
| CarVac wrote:
| I wrote a raw processing app Filmulator that simulates stand
| development/compensating developers to give such an effect to
| digital photography.
|
| I still use it myself but I need to redo the build system and
| release it with an updated LibRaw... not looking forward to
| that.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| For analog photos the negative also has more dynamic range than
| your screen or photopaper without any of that. Contrast is
| applied in the darkroom by choice of photopaper and enlarger
| timing and light levels, or after scanning with contrast
| adjustment applied in post processing. It is really a storage
| medium of information more than how the final image ought to
| look.
|
| Slide film has probably a third the dynamic range of negative
| film and is meant as the final output fit for projection to
| display.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of
| photography. No more shadows and highlights._
|
| HDR is what enables you to capture both the darkest shadow
| detail and the brightest highlight detail.
|
| With SDR, one or both are often simply just lost. It might come
| down to preference -- if you're an "auto" shooter and like the
| effect of the visual information at the edges of the available
| dynamic range being truncated, SDR is for you.
|
| Some people prefer to capture that detail and have the ability
| to decide whether and how to diminish or remove it, with
| commensurately more control over the artistic impact. For those
| folks, HDR is highly desirable.
| dsego wrote:
| Isn't the result of their tone mapping algo similar to adjusting
| shadow and highlight sliders in other software?
| sandofsky wrote:
| No. When you simply adjust shadow and highlights, you lose
| local contrast. In an early draft of the post, there was an
| example, but it was cut for pacing.
| fogleman wrote:
| So, if cameras have poor dynamic range, how are they getting away
| with a single exposure? They didn't explain that at all...
| sandofsky wrote:
| Human vision has around 20 stops of static dynamic range.
| Modern digital cameras can't match human vision-- a $90,000
| Arri Alexa boasts 17 stops-- but they're way better than SDR
| screens.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I chuckled at "The Ed Hardy t-shirt of photography" for the
| early, overdone "HDR-mode" images.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced that _greedy influencers_ are to blame
| for people hating on overly bright content. Instead, I think
| _something_ is different with how displays produce brightness
| compared to just the nature outside. Light outside is supposed to
| reach up to tens of thousands of nits, yet even 1000 nits is
| searing on a display. Is it that displays output polarized light?
| Is it the spectral distribution of especially the better displays
| being three really tight peaks? I cannot tell you, but I 'm
| suspecting something isn't quite right.
|
| All this aside, HDR and high brightness are different things -
| HDR is just a representational thing. You can go full send on
| your SDR monitor as well, you'll just see more banding. The
| majority of the article is just content marketing about how they
| perform automatic tonemapping anyways.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's all down to the ambient light. That's why bias lighting is
| now a thing. Try putting a light behind your screen to
| massively brighten the wall behind it, the 1000 nit peaks will
| be far less harsh. And if you bring the device out into
| sunlight I suspect you will wish for everything about its
| output to be quite a bit brighter.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Light outside is supposed to reach up to tens of thousands of
| nits, yet even 1000 nits is searing on a display.
|
| That's a consequence of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye). If you look at
| 1000 nits on a display in bright sunlight, with your eyes
| adapted to the bright surroundings, the display would look
| rather dim.
| therealmarv wrote:
| ... something Linux Desktops don't understand and Macs only do
| well with their own displays with videos. Guess who the winner is
| on the desktop: Windows oO
| dismalaf wrote:
| Linux does HDR. It's *technically" worked for years but none of
| the big DEs had it working. Now Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42
| (Gnome) have it working out of the box.
| therealmarv wrote:
| ha, interesting. thanks!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| HDR on my MacBook means play the youtube video at full
| brightness no matter how dim I've made the screen.
|
| It's infuriating.
|
| e.g. Open this in macOS Chrome:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq7H6PI4JF8
| bookofjoe wrote:
| As a non-techie I represent the 99.9% of the population who
| haven't a clue what tone mapping etc. is: NO WAY would we ever
| touch the various settings possible as opposed to watching the
| TV/computer screen/etc. as it came out of the box.
| c-fe wrote:
| i am still skeptical about HDR as pretty much all HDR content I
| see online is awful. But this post makes me believe that
| Lux/Halide can pull of HDR in a way that I will like. I am
| looking forward to Halide Mk3.
| alistairSH wrote:
| "The Ed Hardy T-Shirt of Photography"
|
| Literal snort.
| randall wrote:
| This was super awesome. Thanks for this! Especially the HDR photo
| reveal felt really awesome.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography
| industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to
| upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a
| decade for HDTV to reach critical mass.
|
| This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR
| display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies,
| and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work
| screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens
| so I can remote into it without scaling.
| dmitshur wrote:
| To demonstrate some contrast (heh) with another data point from
| someone closer to the other extreme, I've owned a very HDR-
| capable monitor (the Apple Pro Display XDR) since 2020, so
| that's 5 years now. Content that takes full advantage of it is
| still rare, but it's getting better slowly over time.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have a screen which is "HDR" but what that means is when
| you turn the feature on it just makes everything more muted,
| it doesn't actually have any more dynamic range. When you
| turn HDR on for a game it basically just makes most things
| more muddy grey.
|
| I also have a screen which has a huge gamut and blows out
| colors in a really nice way (a bit like the aftereffects of
| hallucinogens, it has colors other screens just don't) and
| you don't have to touch any settings.
|
| My OLED TV has HDR and it actually seems like HDR content
| makes a difference while regular content is still "correct".
| zamadatix wrote:
| The cheap displays adding broken HDR400 support destroyed
| so much public opinion on HDR. Not actually providing a
| wider range but accepting the HDR signal would at least
| have been a minor improvement if the tone mapping weren't
| completely broken to the point most people just associate
| HDR with a washed out picture.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >The cheap displays adding broken HDR400 support
| destroyed so much public opinion on HDR.
|
| It's funny because the display I have that does this was
| a relatively premium Odyssey G7 which at $700 isn't at
| all a cheap monitor. (I like it, it's just not at all
| HDR, or at least not perceivably so compared to Apple
| devices and an OLED TV)
| zamadatix wrote:
| The only HDR monitors I have actually enjoyed (which,
| admittedly, is a slightly higher bar than "most of this
| price aren't completely miscalibrated") have been $1500+
| which is a bit ridiculous considering far cheaper TVs do
| far better with HDR (though tend to suck as monitors). In
| the Odyssey line this would be the Neo G9 options, but
| I've never went home with one because they lack flat
| variants for the ones with good HDR.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _This is also true for consumers. I don 't own a single 4k or
| HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV
| dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my
| work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home
| screens so I can remote into it without scaling._
|
| People in the HN echo chamber over-estimate hardware adoption
| rates. For example, there are millions of people who went
| straight from CDs to streaming, without hitting the iPod era.
|
| A few years ago on HN, there was someone who couldn't wrap
| their brain around the notion that even though VCRs were
| invented in the early 1960's that in 1980, not everyone owned
| one, or if they did, they only had one for the whole family.
|
| Normal people aren't magpies who trash their kit every time
| something shiny comes along.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >there are millions of people who went straight from CDs to
| streaming, without hitting the iPod era
|
| Who?
|
| There was about a decade there where everyone who had the
| slightest interest in music had an mp3 player of some kind,
| at least in the 15-30 age bracket.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know if I count, but I never owned a dedicated MP3
| player[1], I listened to MP3s on my computer, but used CDs
| and cassettes while on the move, until I got an android
| phone that had enough storage to put my music collection
| on.
|
| 1: Well my car would play MP3s burned to CDs in its CD
| player; not sure if that counts.
| 98codes wrote:
| My father, for one. He was entirely happy with radio in the
| car and CDs at home.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I imagine this depends a LOT on your specific age and what
| you were doing in the 00's when MP3 player usage peaked.
|
| I finished high school in 2001 and didn't immediately go to
| college, so I just didn't have a need for a personal music
| player anymore. I was nearly always at home or at work, and
| I drove a car that actually had an MP3 CD player. I felt no
| need to get an iPod.
|
| In 2009, I started going to college, but then also got my
| first smartphone, the Motorola Droid, which acted as my
| portable MP3 player for when I was studying in the library
| or taking mass transit.
|
| If you were going to school or taking mass transit in the
| middle of the '00s, then you were probably more likely to
| have a dedicated MP3 player.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I skipped 2 generations for portable music : went straight
| from cassette to smartphone with MP3 (and radio).
| babypuncher wrote:
| > A few years ago on HN, there was someone who couldn't wrap
| their brain around the notion that even though VCRs were
| invented in the early 1960's that in 1980, not everyone owned
| one, or if they did, they only had one for the whole family.
|
| Point of clarification: While the technology behind the VCR
| was invented in the '50s and matured in the '60s, consumer-
| grade video tape systems weren't really a thing until Betamax
| and VHS arrived in 1975 and 1976 respectively.
|
| Early VCRs were also incredibly expensive, with prices
| ranging from $3,500 to almost $10,000 after adjusting for
| inflation. Just buying into the VHS ecosystem at the entry
| level was a similar investment to buying an Apple Vision Pro
| today.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Exactly my point. But people on HN, especially the person I
| referenced, don't understand that we didn't just throw
| stuff away and go into debt to buy the latest gadgets
| because we were told to.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I don't own a single 4k or HDR display
|
| Don't feel like you have to. I bought a giant fancy TV with it,
| and even though it's impressive, it's kinda like ultra-hifi-
| audio. I don't miss it when I watch the same show on one of my
| older TVs.
|
| If you ever do get it, I suggest doing for a TV that you watch
| with your full attention, and watching TV / movies in the dark.
| It's not very useful on a TV that you might turn on while doing
| housework; but very useful when you are actively watching TV
| with your full attention.
| alerighi wrote:
| I don't either see a point of having 4K TV vs 1080p TV. To me
| is just marketing, I have at my house both a 4K and a 1080p
| and from a normal viewing distance (that is 3/4 meters) you
| don't see differences.
|
| Also in my country (Italy) TV transmissions are 1080i at
| best, a lot are still 570i (PAL resolution). Streaming media
| can be 4K (if you have enough bandwidth to stream it at that
| resolution, which I don't have at my house). Sure, if you
| download pirated movies you find it at 4K, and if you have
| the bandwidth to afford it... sure.
|
| But even there, sometimes is better a well done 1080p movie
| than an hyper compressed 4K one, since you see compression
| artifacts.
|
| To me 1080p, and maybe even 720p, is enough for TV vision.
| Well, sometimes I miss the CRT TVs, they where low resolution
| but for example had a much better picture quality than most
| modern 4K LCD TV where black scenes are gray (I know there is
| OLED, but is too expensive and has other issues).
| zamadatix wrote:
| For TVs under ~80" I feel like you'd have to be sitting
| abnormally close to your TV for it to matter much. At the
| same time I think the cost difference between producing
| 1080p and 4k panels is so low it probably doesn't matter.
| Like you say, things like the backlight technology (or lack
| thereof) make a much bigger difference in perceived quality
| but that's also where the actual cost comes in.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I feel the same way. To be honest even the laptop retina
| screen is excess. I sometimes go back to a 2012 non retina
| macbook pro and to be honest at normal laptop viewing
| angles, you can't really discern pixels. Biggest difference
| is display scaling but I have my retina scaled at what the
| old display would be anyhow because otherwise its too
| small.
|
| Kind of crazy no one thought of this aspect and we just
| march on to higher resolution and the required hardware for
| that.
| some-guy wrote:
| I agree about 4k vs non-4k. I will say going OLED was a
| huge upgrade, even for SDR content. HDR content is hit-or-
| miss...I find some of it is tastefully done but in many
| cases is overdone.
|
| My own movie collection is mostly 2-4GB SDR 1080p files and
| looks wonderful.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| You still watch broadcast TV?
|
| Jokes aside, when a 4k TV has a good upscaler, it's hard to
| tell the difference between 1080 and 4k. Not impossible; I
| certainly can, but 1080 isn't _distracting_.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I totally love HDR on my OLED TV, and definitely miss it on
| others.
|
| Like a lot of things, it's weird how some people are more
| sensitive to visual changes. For example:
|
| - At this point, I need 120hz displays. I can easily notice
| when my wife's phone is in power saver mode at 60hz.
|
| - 4k vs 1080p. This is certainly more subtle, but I
| definitely miss detail in lower res content.
|
| - High bitrate. This is way more important than 4k vs 1080p
| or even HDR. But it's so easy to tell when YouTube lowers the
| quality setting on me, or when a TV show is streaming at a
| crappy bitrate.
|
| - HDR is tricky, because it relies completely on the content
| creator to do a good job producing HDR video. When done well,
| the image basically sparkles, water looks actually wet, parts
| of the image basically glow... it looks so good.
|
| I 100% miss this HDR watching equivalent content on other
| displays. The problem is that a lot of content isn't produced
| to take advantage of this very well. The HDR 4k Blu-ray of
| several Harry Potter movies, for example, has extremely muted
| colors and dark scenes... so how is the image going to pop?
| I'm glad we're seeing more movies rely on bright colors and
| rich, contrasty color grading. There are so many old film
| restorations that look excellent in HDR because the original
| color grade had rich, detailed, contrasty colors.
|
| On top of that, budget HDR implementations, ESPECIALLY in PC
| monitors, just don't get very bright. Which means their HDR
| is basically useless. It's impossible to replicate the
| "shiny, wet look" of really good HDR water if the screen
| can't get bright enough to make it look shiny. Plus, it needs
| to be selective about what gets bright, and cheap TVs don't
| have a lot of backlighting zones to make that happen very
| well.
|
| So whereas I can plug in a 4k 120hz monitor and immediately
| see the benefit in everything I do for normal PC stuff, you
| can't get that with HDR unless you have good source material
| and a decent display.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > At this point, I need 120hz displays. I can easily notice
| when my wife's phone is in power saver mode at 60hz.
|
| Yeah, the judder is a lot more noticeable on older TVs now
| that I have a 120hz TV. IMO, CRTs handled this the best,
| but I'm not going back.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Pretty much any display you can buy today will be HDR capable,
| though that doesn't mean much.
|
| I think the industry is strangling itself putting "DisplayHDR
| 400" certification on edgelit/backlit LCD displays. In order
| for HDR to look "good" you either need high resolution full
| array local dimming backlighting (which still isn't perfect),
| or a panel type that doesn't use any kind of backlighting like
| OLED.
|
| Viewing HDR content on these cheap LCDs often looks worse than
| SDR content. You still get the wider color gamut, but the
| contrast just isn't there. Local dimming often loses all detail
| in shadows whenever there is something bright on the screen.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| HDR marketing on monitors almost seems like a scam. Monitors
| will claim HDR compatibility when what they actually means is
| they will take the HDR data stream and display it exactly the
| same as SDR content because they don't actually have the
| contrast and brightness ability of a proper HDR monitor.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| Few things are in absolutes. Yes most consumers wont have every
| screen hdr nor 4k, but most consumers use a modern smartphone
| and just about every modern smartphone from the past half
| decade or more has hdr of some level.
|
| I absolutely loathe consuming content on a mobile screen, but
| its the reality is the vast majority are using phone and
| tablets most the time.
| mxfh wrote:
| Funny enough HDR content works absolutely perfect as long as
| it stays on device that has both HDR-recording and display
| tech, aka smartphones.
|
| The problem starts with sending HDR content to SDR-only
| devices, or even just other HDR-standards. Not even talking
| about printing here.
|
| This step can inherently only be automated so much, because
| it's also a stylistic decision on what information to keep or
| emphasize. This is an editorial process, not something you
| want to emburden casual users with. What works for some
| images can't work for others. Even with AI the preference
| would still need to be aligned.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| How would I know if my android phone has an HDR screen?
|
| [edit]
|
| Some googling suggested I check in the Netflix app; at least
| Netflix thinks my phone does not support HDR. (Unihertz Jelly
| Max)
| EasyMark wrote:
| I have to think you are are the 1-3% outlier though. Everyone I
| know has an HDR screen even my friend who never buys anything
| new, but he did run out and buy an HDR tv to replace his old
| one that he gave to his son.
| edelhans wrote:
| I honestly do not know if I have any screen that supports
| HDR. At least I've never noticed any improved image quality
| when viewing HDR video content and compare the image on my M3
| Macbook Pro screen vs. an old external IPS monitor. Maybe my
| eyes are just broken?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Only my laptop supports HDR. But that's one that I own anyway.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| If anyone was hoping for a more technical explanation, I find
| these pages do a good job explaining the inner workings behind
| the format
|
| https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth....
|
| https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac...
|
| https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...
| asafira wrote:
| I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and
| despite "optical" being part of that I realized midway that I
| didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked!
|
| It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be
| extremely important in the work I did during the early days at
| Waymo and later at Motional.
|
| I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that
| discusses HDR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . It's
| short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers.
|
| Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital
| photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his
| Stanford course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-
| fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . I believe he runs his own group at
| Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making
| their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of
| years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with
| most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Pixel camera hardware or software? Isnt there only one vendor
| for sensors - Sony?
| dawidpotocki wrote:
| Samsung also makes sensors for phones. IIRC some Pixels use
| their sensors.
| xattt wrote:
| Is Sony the ASML of the sensor world?
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Definitely
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I think Canon makes at least some of their sensors, and
| Nikon designs theirs and makes it at a third party I forget
| the name of that isn't Sony or Samsung but they still do
| use Sony stuff in a lot of their cameras.
|
| I don't know about Pentax, Panasonic or OMD (formerly
| Olympus)
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| I think folks here have some idea how expensive chip fabs
| are. That's why only Canon is able to make their own
| sensors.
|
| Sony makes sensors for pretty much everyone else. But
| it's well known that other folks e.g. Nikon have been
| able to get better signal-to-noise with Sony-made sensors
| than Sony themselves. I think Panasonic used to make
| their own sensors but with some recent re-org, that got
| spun out.
|
| It's been widely rumored that Leica uses Sony sensors,
| but this gets repeatedly denied by people claiming inside
| information. We know that Leica was getting 24MP CMOS
| sensors from CMOSIS in the 2012 timeframe, but CMOSIS has
| since been acquired by OSRAM, and there hasn't been any
| verifiable information since then, whether confirming or
| denying a continued business relationship.
| asafira wrote:
| He worked mostly on the software side, but of course had
| important input into what sensors and processors were chosen
| for the phones.
| spookie wrote:
| Try capturing fire with a non-Sony phone and a Sony phone. At
| least Samsung doesn't color correct blackbodies right and the
| flame looks nothing like reality.
| bigtones wrote:
| That Kevin Chen video using Excel was amazing and hilarious.
| Thanks.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Is there any workflow that can output HDR photos (like the real
| HDR kind, with metadata to tell the display to go into HDR mode)
| for photos shot with a mirrorless and not an iPhone?
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| Yes. For example, Lightroom and Camera Raw support HDR editing
| and export from RAW images, and Adobe published a good rundown
| on the feature when they introduced it.
|
| https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained
|
| Greg Benz Photography maintains a list of software here:
|
| https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/
|
| I'm not sure what FOSS options there are; it's difficult to
| search for given that "HDR" can mean three or four different
| things in common usage.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > AI cannot read your mind, so it cannot honor your intent.
|
| This. I can always tell when someone "gets" software development
| when they either understand (or don't) that computers can't read
| minds or infer intent like a person can.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Is there a consensus definition of what counts as "HDR" in a
| display? What is the "standard dynamic range" of a typical TV or
| computer monitor? Is it roughly the same for devices of the same
| age?
|
| My understanding is most SDR TVs and computer screens have
| displays about 200-300 nits (aka cd/m2). Is that the correct
| measure of the range of the display? The brightest white is 300
| nits brighter than the darkest black?
| lloeki wrote:
| Yes, and not just static but dynamic properties:
| https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| this isn't a correct definition. human perception of brightness
| is roughly logarithmic, so it also matters how deep the blacks
| get. For a good HDR experience, you need a monitor that gets to
| 600 nits at a bare minimum, but also which can get very close
| to 0 nits (e.g. via OLED or less optionally local dimming)
| caseyy wrote:
| HDR is when you're watching a dark film at night, looking at the
| subtle nuances between shades of dark and black in the shadows on
| the screen, making out the faint contours the film director
| carefully curated, and the subtitles gently deposit 40W of light
| into your optical nerves with "".
| shrx wrote:
| I actually kind of hate the fact that the subtitles on my (SDR)
| OLED display never get as bright as some parts of the video
| itself.
| dahart wrote:
| It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR
| display together, these are very different things. The claim that
| Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion, and
| isn't particularly accurate.
|
| We've had HDR formats and HDR capture and edit workflows since
| long before HDR displays. The big benefit of HDR capture &
| formats is that your "negative" doesn't clip super bright colors
| and doesn't lose color resolution in super dark color. As a
| photographer, with HDR you can re-expose the image when you
| display/print it, where previously that wasn't possible.
| Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or
| under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing HDR
| gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom, allowing them
| to adjust exposure after the fact. Ansel Adams wasn't using HDR
| in the same sense we're talking about, he was just really good at
| capturing the right exposure for his medium without needing to
| adjust it later. There is a very valid argument to be made for
| doing the work up-front to capture what you're after, but
| ignoring that for a moment, it is simply not possible to re-
| expose Adams' negatives to reveal color detail he didn't capture.
| That's why he's not using HDR, and why saying he is will only
| further muddy the water.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Adams adjusted heavily with dodging and burning, even working
| to invent a new chemical process to provide more control when
| developing. He was great at determining exposure for his
| process as well. A key skill was having a vision for what the
| image would be after adjusting. Adams talked a lot about this
| as a top priority of his process.
| Demiurge wrote:
| > It's even more incredible that this was done on paper,
| which has even less dynamic range than computer screens!
|
| I came here to point this out. You have a pretty high dynamic
| range in the captured medium, and then you can use the tools
| you have to darken or lighten portions of the photograph when
| transferring it to paper.
| jrapdx3 wrote:
| Indeed so. Printing on paper and other substrates is
| inherently subtractive in nature which limits the gamut of
| colors and values that can be reproduced. Digital methods
| make the job of translating additive to subtractive media
| easier vs. the analog techniques available to film
| photographers. In any case, the image quality classic
| photography was able to achieve is truly remarkable.
|
| Notably, the dodging and burning used by photographers
| aren't obsolete. There's a reason these tools are included
| in virtually every image-editing program out there.
| Manipulating dynamic range, particularly in printed images,
| remains part of the craft of image-making.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Contact printing on azo certainly helped!
| albumen wrote:
| But the article even shows Adams dodging/burning a print, which
| is 'adjusting the exposure' in a localised fashion of the high
| dynamic range of the film, effectively revealing detail for the
| LDR of the resulting print that otherwise wouldn't have been
| visible.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Arguably, even considering HDR a distinct thing is itself weird
| an inaccurate.
|
| All mediums have a range, and they've never all matched.
| Sometimes we've tried to calibrate things to match, but anyone
| watching SDR content for the past many years probably didn't do
| so on a color-calibrated and brightness calibrated screen -
| that wouldn't allow you to have a brightness slider.
|
| HDR on monitors is about communicating content brightness and
| monitor capabilities, but then you have the question of whether
| to clip the highlights or just map the range when the content
| is mastered for 4000 nits but your monitor manages 1000-1500
| and only in a small window.
| dahart wrote:
| This! Yes I think you're absolutely right. The term "HDR" is
| in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats
| evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time
| when the most popular image formats and most common displays
| were not very sophisticated about colors.
|
| That said, there is one important part that is often lost.
| One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture
| absolute values in physical units, rather than relative
| brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and
| paper and TVs don't have. Some new displays are getting
| absolute brightness features, but historically most media
| display relative color values.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Absolute is also a funny size. From the perspective of
| human visual perception, an absolute brightness only
| matters if the entire viewing environment is also
| controlled to the same absolute values. Visual perception
| is highly contextual, and we are not only seeing the
| screen.
|
| It's not fun being unable to watch dark scenes during the
| day or evening in a living room, nor is vaporizing your
| retinas if the ambient environment went dark in the
| meantime. People want good viewing experience in the
| available environment that is logically similar to what the
| content intended, but that is not always the same as
| reproducing the exact same photons as the directors's
| mastering monitor sent towards their their eyeballs at the
| time of production.
| dahart wrote:
| Yep, absolutely! ;)
|
| This brings up a bunch of good points, and it tracks with
| what I was trying to say about conflating HDR processing
| with HDR display. But do keep in mind that even when you
| have absolute value images, that doesn't imply anything
| about how you display them. You can experience large
| benefits with an HDR workflow, even when your output or
| display is low dynamic range. Assume that there will be
| some tone mapping process happening and that the way you
| map tones depends on the display medium and its
| capabilities, and on the context and environment of the
| display. Using the term "HDR" shouldn't imply any
| mismatch or disconnect in the viewing environment. It
| only did so in the article because it wasn't very careful
| about its terms and definitions.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Indeed. For a movie scene depicting the sky including the
| Sun, you probably wouldn't want your TV to achieve the
| same brightness as the Sun. You _might_ want your TV to
| become significantly brighter than the rest of the
| scenes, to achieve an effect _something_ like the Sun
| catching your eye.
|
| Of course, the same thing goes for audio in movies. You
| probably want a gunshot or explosion to sound loud and
| even be slightly shocking, but you probably don't want it
| to be as loud as a real gunshot or explosion would be
| from the depicted distance.
|
| The difference is that for 3+ decades the dynamic range
| of ubiquitous audio formats (like 16 bit PCM in audio CDs
| and DVDs) has provided far more dynamic range than is
| comfortably usable in normal listening environments. So
| we're very familiar with audio being mastered with a much
| smaller dynamic range than the medium supports.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The term "HDR" arguably makes more sense for the effect
| achieved by tone mapping multiple exposures of the same
| subject onto a "normal" (e.g. SRGB) display. In this case,
| the "high" in "HDR" just means "from a source with higher
| dynamic range than the display."
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Remember "wide gamut" screens ?
|
| This is part of 'HDR' standards too...
|
| And it's quite annoying that 'HDR' (and which specific one
| ?) is treated as just being 'on' or 'off' even for power
| users...
| theshackleford wrote:
| > but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small
| window.
|
| Owning a display that can do 1300+ nits sustained across a
| 100% window has been the biggest display upgrade I think I
| have ever had. It's given me a tolerance for LCD, a
| technology I've hated since the death of CRTs and turned me
| away from OLED.
|
| There was a time I would have said i'd never own a non OLED
| display again. But a _capable_ HDR display changed that logic
| in a big way.
|
| Too bad the motion resolution on it, especially compared to
| OLED is meh. Again, at one point, motion was the most
| important aspect to me (its why I still own CRTs) but this
| level of HDR...transformative for lack of a better word.
| lotrjohn wrote:
| Hello fellow CRT owner. What is your use case? Retro video
| games? PC games? Movies?
| theshackleford wrote:
| Hello indeed!
|
| > What is your use case? Retro video games? PC games?
| Movies?
|
| All of the above! The majority of my interest largely
| stems from the fact that for whatever reason, I am
| INCREDIBLY sensitive to sample and hold motion blur.
| Whilst I tolerate it for modern gaming because I largely
| have no choice, CRT's mean I do not for my retro gaming,
| which I very much enjoy. (I was very poor growing up, so
| most of it for me is not even nostalgia, most of these
| games are new to me.)
|
| Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home
| with a 32" trinitron. I collect laserdisc/VHS and we have
| "retro video" nights where for whatever reason, we watch
| the worst possible quality copies of movies we could get
| in significantly higher definition. Much the same as
| videogames, I was not exposed to a lot of media growing
| up, my wife has also not seen many things because she was
| in Russia back then, so there is a ton for us to catch up
| on very slowly and it just makes for a fun little date
| night every now and again.
|
| Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's
| likely most of my CRT's will be sold, or at least the
| broadcast monitors. I do not look forward to it haha.
| lotrjohn wrote:
| > Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home
| with a 32" trinitron.
|
| A 32" Trinny. Nice. I have the 32" JVC D-series which I
| consider my crown jewel. It's for retro gaming and I have
| a laserdisc player but a very limited selection of
| movies. Analog baby.
|
| > Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage,
| it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold
|
| Mortgage = space. You won't believe the nooks and
| crannies you can fit CRTs into. Attic. Shed. Crawl space.
| Space under basement stairs. Heck, even the neighbors
| house. I have no less than 14 CRTs ferreted away in the
| house. Wife thinks I have only 5. Get creative. Don't
| worry about the elements, these puppies were built to
| survive nuclear blasts. Do I have a sickness? Probably.
| But analog!!!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Speaking of laser disc it's wild how vivid colors are on
| that platform. My main example movie is Star Trek First
| contact and everything is very colorful. DVD is muddy.
| Even a Blu-ray copy kinda looks like crap. A total side
| note is the surround sound for that movie is absolutely
| awesome especially the cube battle scene.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > I have the 32" JVC D-series which
|
| I would _love_ one of these however I have never seen one
| in my country. Super jealous haha! The tubes they use
| apparently were an american made tube, with most of the
| JVCs that were released in my country using different
| tubes than those released in the US market.
|
| That being said, I do own two JVC "broadcast" monitors
| that I love. A 17" and a 19". They are no D-series real
| "TV" but.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Motion resolution? Do you mean the pixel response time?
|
| CRTs technically have quite a few artifacts in this area,
| but as content displayed CRTs tend to be built for CRTs
| this is less of an issue, and in many case even required.
| The input is expecting specific distortions and effects
| from scanlines and phosphor, which a "perfect" display
| wouldn't exhibit...
|
| The aggressive OLED ABL is simply a thermal issue. It can
| be mitigated with thermal design in smaller devices, and
| anything that increases efficiency (be it micro lens
| arrays, stacked "tandem" panels, quantum dots, alternative
| emitter technology) will lower the thermal load and
| increase the max full panel brightness.
|
| (LCD with zone dimming would also be able to pull this
| trick to get even brighter zones, but because the base
| brightness is high enough it doesn't bother.)
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Motion resolution? Do you mean the pixel response time?
|
| I indeed meant motion resolution, which pixel response
| time only partially affects. It's about how clearly a
| display shows motion, unlike static resolution which only
| reflects realistically a still image. Even with fast
| pixels, sample and hold displays blur motion unless
| framerate and refresh rate is high, or BFI/strobing is
| used. This blur immediately lowers perceived resolution
| the moment anything moves on screen.
|
| > The input is expecting specific distortions and effects
| from scanlines and phosphor, which a "perfect" display
| wouldn't exhibit...
|
| That's true for many CRT purists, but is not a huge deal
| for me personally. My focus is motion performance. If
| LCD/OLED matched CRT motion at the same refresh rate, I'd
| drop CRT in a heartbeat, slap on a CRT shader, and call
| it a day. Heresy to many CRT enthusiasts.
|
| Ironically, this is an area in which I feel we are
| getting CLOSE enough with the new higher refresh OLEDs
| for non HDR retro content in combination with:
| https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-
| looks... (which hopefully will continue to be improved.)
|
| > The aggressive OLED ABL is simply a thermal issue.
|
| Theoretically, yes and there's been progress, but it's
| still unsolved in practice. If someone shipped an OLED
| twice as thick and full of fans and heatsinks, I'd buy it
| tomorrow. But that's not what the market wants, so
| obviously it's not what they make.
|
| > It can be mitigated with thermal design in smaller
| devices, and anything that increases efficiency (be it
| micro lens arrays, stacked "tandem" panels, quantum dots,
| alternative emitter technology) will lower the thermal
| load and increase the max full panel brightness.
|
| Sure, in theory. But so far the improvements (like QD-
| OLED or MLA) haven't gone far enough. I already own
| panels using these. Beyond that, much of the tech isn't
| in the display types I care about, or isn't ready yet.
| Which is a pity, because the tandem based displays I have
| seen in usage are really decent.
|
| That said, the latest G5 WOLEDs are the first I'd call
| acceptable for HDR at high APL, for the preferences I
| hold with very decent real scene brightness, at least in
| film. Sadly, I doubt we'll see comparable performance in
| PC monitors until many years down the track and monitors
| are my preference.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause
| confusion_
|
| That isn't what the article claims. It says:
|
| "Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers of the 20th
| century, was a master at capturing dramatic, high dynamic range
| scenes."
|
| "Use HDR" (your term) is vague to the point of not meaning much
| of anything, but the article is clear that Adams was capturing
| scenes that had a high dynamic range, which is objectively
| true.
| dahart wrote:
| Literally the sentence preceding the one you quoted is "What
| if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far
| back as 1857?".
| zymhan wrote:
| And that quote specifically does _not_ "lump HDR capture,
| HDR formats and HDR display together".
|
| It is directly addressing _capture_.
| dahart wrote:
| Correct. I didn't say that sentence was the source of the
| conflation, I said it was the source of the Ansel Adams
| problem. There are other parts that mix together capture,
| formats, and display.
|
| Edit: and btw I am objecting to calling film capture
| "HDR", I don't think that helps define HDR nor reflects
| accurately on the history of the term.
| pavlov wrote:
| That's a strange claim because the first digital HDR
| capture devices were film scanners (for example the
| Cineon equipment used by the motion picture industry in
| the 1990s).
|
| Film provided a higher dynamic range than digital
| sensors, and professionals wanted to capture that for
| image editing.
|
| Sure, it wasn't terribly deep HDR by today's standards.
| Cineon used 10 bits per channel with the white point at
| coding value 685 (and a log color space). That's still a
| lot more range and superwhite latitude than you got with
| standard 8-bpc YUV video.
| dahart wrote:
| They didn't call that "HDR" at the time, and it wasn't
| based on the idea of recording radiance or other absolute
| physical units.
|
| I'm certain physicists had high range digital cameras
| before Cineon, and they were working in absolute physical
| metrics. That would be a stronger example.
|
| You bring up an important point that is completely lost
| in the HDR discussion: this is about color resolution at
| least as much as it's about range, if not moreso. I can
| use 10 bits for a [0..1] range just as easily as I can
| use 4 bits to represent quantized values from 0 to 10^9.
| Talking about the range of a scene captured is leaving
| out most of the story, and all of the important parts.
| We've had outdoor photography, high quality films, and
| the ability to control exposure for a long time, and that
| doesn't explain what "HDR" is.
| pavlov wrote:
| It certainly was called HDR when those Cineon files were
| processed in a linear light workflow. And film was the
| only capture source available that could provide
| sufficient dynamic range, so IMO that makes it "HDR".
|
| But I agree that the term is such a wide umbrella that
| almost anything qualifies. Fifteen years ago you could do
| a bit of superwhite glows and tone mapping on 8-bpc and
| people called that look HDR.
| dahart wrote:
| Do you have any links from 1990ish that show use of
| "HDR"? I am interested in when "HDR" became a phrase
| people used. I believe I remember hearing it first around
| 1996 or 97, but it may have started earlier. It was
| certainly common by 2001. I don't see that used as a term
| nor an acronym in the Cineon docs from 1995, but it does
| talk about log and linear spaces and limiting the dynamic
| range when converting. The Cineon scanner predates sRGB,
| and used gamma 1.7. https://dotcsw.com/doc/cineon1.pdf
|
| This 10 bit scanner gave you headroom of like 30% above
| white. So yeah it qualifies as a type of high dynamic
| range when compared to 8 bit/channel RGB, but on the
| other hand, a range of [0 .. 1.3] isn't exactly in the
| spirit of what "HDR" stands for. The term implicitly
| means a _lot_ more than 1.0, not just a little. And again
| people developing HDR like Greg Ward and Paul Debevec
| were arguing for absolute units such as luminance, which
| the Cineon scanner does not do.
| altairprime wrote:
| It was called "extended dynamic range" by ILM when they
| published the OpenEXR spec (2003):
|
| > _OpenEXR (www.openexr.net), its previously proprietary
| extended dynamic range image file format, to the open
| source community_
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170721234341/http://www.ope
| nex...
|
| And "larger dynamic range" by Rea & Jeffrey (1990):
|
| > _With g = 1 there is equal brightness resolution over
| the entire unsaturated image at the expense of a larger
| dynamic range within a given image. Finally, the
| automatic gain control, AGC, was disabled so that the
| input /output relation would be constant over the full
| range of scene luminances._
|
| https://doi.org/10.1080/00994480.1990.10747942
|
| I'm not sure when everyone settled on "high" rather than
| "large" or "extended", but certainly 'adjective dynamic
| range' is near-universal.
| dahart wrote:
| As I remember it, Paul Debevec had borrowed Greg Ward's
| RGBE file format at some point in the late 90s and
| rebranded it ".hdr" for his image viewer tool (hdrView)
| and code to convert a stack of LDR exposures into HDR. I
| can see presentations online from Greg Ward in 2001 that
| have slides with "HDR" and "HDRI" all over the place. So
| yeah the term definitely must have started in the late
| 90s if not earlier. I'm not sure it was as there in the
| early 90s though.
| altairprime wrote:
| Oo, interesting! That led me to this pair of sentences:
|
| "Making global illumination user-friendly" (Ward, 1995) h
| ttps://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/papers/erw95.1/paper.html
|
| > _Variability is a qualitative setting that indicates
| how much light levels vary in the zone, i.e. the dynamic
| range of light landing on surfaces._
|
| > _By the nature of the situation being modeled, the user
| knows whether to expect a high degree of variability in
| the lighting or a low one._
|
| Given those two phrases, 'a high or low degree of
| variability in the lighting' translates as 'a high or low
| degree of dynamic range' -- or would be likely to, given
| human abbreviation tendencies, in successive works and
| conversations.
| munificent wrote:
| Yes, Ansel Adams was using a camera to capture a scene that
| had high dynamic range.
|
| I don't see the confusion here.
| dahart wrote:
| HDR is not referring to the scene's range, and it doesn't
| apply to film. It's referring superficially but
| specifically to a digital process that improves on 8
| bits/channel RGB images. And one of the original intents
| behind HDR was to capture pixels in absolute physical
| measurements like radiance, to enable a variety of post-
| processing workflows that are not available to film.
| altairprime wrote:
| The digital process of tonemapping, aka. 'what Apple
| calls Smart HDR processing of SDR photos to increase
| perceptual dynamic range', can be applied to images of
| any number of channels of any bit depth -- though, if you
| want to tonemap a HyperCard dithered black-and-white
| image, you'll probably have to decompile the dithering as
| part of creating the gradient map. Neither RGB nor 8-bit
| are necessary to make tonemapping a valuable step in
| image processing.
| dahart wrote:
| That's true, and it's why tonemapping is distinct from
| HDR. If you follow the link from @xeonmc's comment and
| read the comments, the discussion centers on the
| conflation of tonemapping and HDR.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987923
|
| That said, the entire reason that tonemapping is a thing,
| and the primary focus of the tonemapping literature, is
| to solve the problem of squeezing images with very wide
| ranges into narrow display ranges like print and non-HDR
| displays, and to achieve a natural look that mirrors
| human perception of wide ranges. Tonemapping might be
| technically independent of HDR, but they did co-evolve,
| and that's part of the history.
| munificent wrote:
| "High dynamic range" is a phrase that is much older than
| tone mapping. I see uses of "dynamic range" going back to
| the 1920s and "high dynamic range" to the 1940s:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dynamic+ran
| ge%...
|
| You might argue that "HDR" the _abbreviation_ refers to
| using tone mapping to approximate rendering high dynamic
| range imagery on lower dynamic range displays. But even
| then, the sentence in question doesn 't use the
| abbreviation. It is specifically talking about a dynamic
| range that is high.
|
| Dynamic range is a property of any signal or quantifiable
| input, including, say sound pressure hitting our ears or
| photons hitting an eyeball, film, or sensor.
| dahart wrote:
| > But even then, the sentence in question doesn't use the
| abbreviation
|
| Yes it does. Why are you still looking at a different
| sentence than the one I quoted??
|
| HDR in this context isn't referring to just any dynamic
| range. If it was, then it would be so vague as to be
| meaningless.
|
| Tone mapping is closely related to HDR and very often
| used, but is not necessary and does not define HDR. To me
| it seems like your argument is straw man. Photographers
| have never broadly used the term "high dynamic range" as
| a phrase, nor the acronym "HDR" before it showed up in
| computer apps like hdrView, Photoshop, and iPhone camera.
| munificent wrote:
| Oh, sorry, you're right. Mentioning the abbreviation is a
| red herring. The full quote is:
|
| "But what if we don't need that tradeoff? What if I told
| you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as
| 1857? Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers
| of the 20th century, was a master at capturing dramatic,
| high dynamic range scenes. It's even more incredible that
| this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range
| than computer screens!"
|
| It seems pretty clear to me that in this context the
| author is referring to the high dynamic range of the
| scenes that Adams pointed his camera at. That's why he
| says "captured HDR" and "high dynamic range scenes".
| dahart wrote:
| > It seems pretty clear to me that in this context the
| author is referring to the high dynamic range of the
| scenes that Adams pointed his camera at.
|
| Yes, this is the problem I have with the article. "HDR"
| is not characterized solely by the range of the scene,
| and never was. It's a term of art that refers to an
| increased range (and resolution) on the capture and
| storage side, and it's referring to a workflow that
| involves/enables deferring exposure until display time.
| The author's claim here is making the term "HDR" harder
| to understand, not easier, and it's leaving out of the
| most important conceptual aspects. There are some
| important parallels between film and digital HDR, and
| there are some important differences. The differences are
| what make claiming that nineteenth century photographers
| were capturing HDR problematic and inaccurate.
| samplatt wrote:
| To further complicate the issue, "high dynamic range" is
| a phrase that will come up across a few different
| disciplines, not just related to the capture &
| reproduction of visual data.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think about the Ansel Adams zone system
|
| https://www.kimhildebrand.com/how-to-use-the-zone-system/
|
| where my interpretation is colored by the experience of
| making high quality prints and viewing them under different
| conditions, particularly poor illumination quality but you
| could also count "small handheld game console", "halftone
| screened and printed on newsprint" as other degraded
| conditions. In those cases you might imagine that the eye can
| only differentiate between 11 tones so even if an image has
| finer detail it ought to connect well with people if colors
| were quantized. (I think about concept art from _Pokemon Sun
| and Moon_ which looked great printed with a thermal printer
| because it was designed to look great on a cheap screen.)
|
| In my mind, the ideal image would look good quantized to 11
| zones but also has interesting detail in texture in 9 of the
| zones (extreme white and black don't show texture). That's a
| bit of an oversimplification (maybe a shot outdoors in the
| snow is going to trend really bright, maybe for artistic
| reasons you want things to be really dark, ...) but Ansel
| Adams manually "tone mapped" his images using dodging,
| burning and similar techniques to make it so.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and
| HDR display together
|
| Reminded me of the classic "HDR in games vs HDR in photography"
| comparison[0]
|
| [0] https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
| levidos wrote:
| Is there a difference in capturing in HDR vs RAW?
| dahart wrote:
| Good question. I think it depends. They are kind of different
| concepts, but in practice they can overlap considerably. RAW
| is about using the camera's full native color resolution, and
| not having lossy compression. HDR is overloaded, as you can
| see from the article & comments, but I think HDR capture is
| conceptually about expressing brightness in physical units
| like luminance or radiance, and delaying the 'exposure' until
| display time. Both RAW and HDR typically mean using more than
| 8 bits/channel and capturing high quality images that will
| withstand more post-processing than 'exposed' LDR images can
| handle.
| sandofsky wrote:
| > It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and
| HDR display together, these are very different things.
|
| These are all related things. When you talk about color, you
| can be talking about color cameras, color image formats, and
| color screens, but the concept of color transcends the
| implementation.
|
| > The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause
| confusion, and isn't particularly accurate.
|
| The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the
| words, "capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes."
|
| > Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or
| under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing
| HDR gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom,
| allowing them to adjust exposure after the fact.
|
| This is just factually wrong. Film negatives have 12-stops of
| useful dynamic range, while photo paper has 8 stops at best.
| That gave photographers exposure latitude during the print
| process.
|
| > Ansel Adams wasn't using HDR in the same sense we're talking
| about, he was just really good at capturing the right exposure
| for his medium without needing to adjust it later.
|
| There's a photo of Ansel Adams in the article, dodging and
| burning a print. How would you describe that if not adjusting
| the exposure?
| dahart wrote:
| I agree capture, format and display are closely related. But
| HDR capture and processing specifically developed outside of
| HDR display devices, and use of HDR displays changes how HDR
| images are used compared to LDR displays.
|
| > The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose
| the words
|
| Hey I'm sorry for criticizing, but I honestly feel like
| you're being slightly misleading here. The sentence "What if
| I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back
| as 1857?" is explicitly claiming that analog photographers
| use "HDR" capture, and the Ansel Adams sentence that follows
| appears to be merely a specific example of your claim. The
| result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact
| claim Adams used HDR, even if you didn't quite intend to.
|
| I think you're either misunderstanding me a little, or maybe
| unaware of some of the context of HDR and its development as
| a term of art in the computer graphics community. Film's 12
| stops is not really "high" range by HDR standards, and a
| little exposure latitude isn't where "HDR" came from. The
| more important part of HDR was the intent to push toward
| absolute physical units like luminance. That doesn't just
| enable deferred exposure, it enables physical and perceptual
| processing in ways that aren't possible with film. It enables
| calibrated integration with CG simulation that isn't possible
| with film. And it enables a much wider rage of exposure
| push/pull than you can do when going from 12 stops to 8. And
| of course non-destructive digital deferred exposure at
| display time is quite different from a print exposure.
|
| Perhaps it's useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a
| counterpart called LDR that's referring to 8 bits/channel
| RGB. With analog photography, there is no LDR, thus zero
| reason to invent the notion of a 'higher' range. Higher than
| what? High relative to what? Analog cameras have exposure
| control and thus can capture any range you want. There is no
| 'high' range in analog photos, there's just range. HDR was
| invented to push against and evolve beyond the de-facto
| digital practices of the 70s-90s, it is not a statement about
| what range can be captured by a camera.
| sandofsky wrote:
| > The sentence "What if I told you that analog
| photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?" is
| explicitly claiming that analog photographers use "HDR"
| capture,
|
| No, it isn't. It's saying they captured HDR scenes.
|
| > The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did
| in fact claim Adams used HDR
|
| You can't "use" HDR. It's an adjective, not a noun.
|
| > Film's 12 stops is not really "high" range by HDR
| standards, and a little exposure latitude isn't where "HDR"
| came from.
|
| The Reinhard tone mapper, a benchmark that regularly
| appears in research papers, specifically cites Ansel Adams
| as inspiration.
|
| "A classic photographic task is the mapping of the
| potentially high dynamic range of real world luminances to
| the low dynamic range of the photographic print."
|
| https://www-
| old.cs.utah.edu/docs/techreports/2002/pdf/UUCS-0...
|
| > Perhaps it's useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a
| counterpart called LDR that's referring to 8 bits/channel
| RGB.
|
| 8-bits per channel does not describe dynamic range. If I
| attach an HLG transfer function on an 8-bit signal, I have
| HDR. Furthermore, assuming you actually meant 8-bit sRGB,
| nobody calls that "LDR." It's SDR.
|
| > Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture
| any range you want.
|
| This sentence makes no sense.
| dahart wrote:
| Sorry man, you seem really defensive, I didn't mean to
| put you on edge. Okay, if you are calling the scenes
| "HDR" then I'm happy to rescind my critique about Ansel
| Adams and switch instead to pointing out that "HDR"
| doesn't refer to the range of the scene, it refers to the
| range _capability_ of a digital capture process. I think
| the point ultimately ends up being the same either way.
| Hey where is HDR defined as an adjective? Last time I
| checked, "range" could be a noun, I think... no? You must
| be right, but FWIW, you used HDR as a noun in your 2nd to
| last point... oh and in the title of your article too.
|
| Hey it's great Reinhard was inspired by Adams. I have
| been too, like a lot of photographers. And I've used the
| Reinhard tone mapper in research papers, I'm quite
| familiar with it and personally know all three authors of
| that paper. I've even written a paper or maybe two on
| color spaces with one of them. Anyway, the inspiration
| doesn't change the fact that 12 stops isn't particularly
| high dynamic range. It's _barely_ more than SDR. Even the
| earliest HDR formats had like 20 or 30 stops, in part
| because the point was to use physical luminance _instead_
| of a relative [0..1] range.
|
| 8 bit RGB does sort-of in practice describe a dynamic
| range, as long as the 1 bit difference is approximately
| the 'just noticeable difference' or JND as some
| researchers call it. This happens to line up with 8 bits
| being about 8 stops, which is what RGB images have been
| doing for like 50 years, give or take. While it's
| perfectly valid arithmetic to use 8 bits values to
| represent an arbitrary amount like 200 stops or 0.003
| stops, it'd be pretty weird.
|
| Plenty of people have called and continue to call 8 bit
| images "LDR", here's just three of the thousands of uses
| of "LDR" [1][2][3], and LDR predates usage of SDR by like
| 15 years maybe? LDR predates sRGB too, I did not actually
| mean 8 bit sRGB. LDR and SDR are close but not quite the
| same thing, so feel free to read up on LDR. It's
| disappointing you ducked the actual point I was making,
| which is still there even if you replace LDR with SDR.
|
| What is confusing about the sentence about analog cameras
| and exposure control? I'm happy to explain it since you
| didn't get it. I was referring to how the aperture can be
| adjusted on an analog camera to make a scene with any
| dynamic range fit into the ~12 stops of range the film
| has, or the ~8 stops of range of paper or an old TV. I
| was just trying to clarify _why_ HDR is an attribute of
| digital images, and not of scenes.
|
| [1] https://www.easypano.com/showkb_228.html#:~:text=The%
| 20Dynam...
|
| [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/shows-digital-
| photograph...
|
| [3] https://irisldr.github.io/
| sandofsky wrote:
| You opened this thread arguing that Ansel Adams didn't
| "use HDR." I linked you to a seminal research paper which
| argues that he tone mapped HDR content, and goes on to
| implement a tone mapper based on his approach. This all
| seems open and shut.
|
| > I'm happy to rescind my critique about Ansel Adams
|
| Great, I'm done.
|
| > and switch instead to pointing out that "HDR" doesn't
| refer to the range of the scene
|
| Oh god. Here's the first research paper that popped into
| my head: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/hdrpl
| usdata.org/e...
|
| "Surprisingly, daytime shots with high dynamic range may
| also suffer from lack of light."
|
| "In low light, or in very high dynamic range scenes"
|
| "For high dynamic range scenes we use local tone mapping"
|
| You keep trying to define "HDR" differently than current
| literature. Not even current-- that paper was published
| in 2016! Hey, maybe HDR meant something different in the
| 1990s, or maybe it was just ok to use "HDR" as shorthand
| for when things were less ambiguous. I honestly don't
| care, and you're only serving to confuse people.
|
| > the aperture can be adjusted on an analog camera to
| make a scene with any dynamic range fit into the ~12
| stops of range the film has, or the ~8 stops of range of
| paper or an old TV.
|
| You sound nonsensical because you keep using the wrong
| terms. Going back to your first sentence that made no
| sense:
|
| > Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can
| capture any range you want
|
| You keep saying "range" when, from what I can tell, you
| mean "luminance." Changing a camera's aperture scales the
| luminance hitting your film or sensor. It does not alter
| the dynamic range of the scene.
|
| Analog cameras cannot capture any range. By adjusting
| camera settings or attaching ND filters, you can change
| the window of luminance values that will fit within the
| dynamic range of your camera. To say a camera can
| "capture any range" is like saying, "I can fit that couch
| through the door, I just have to saw it in half."
|
| > And I've used the Reinhard tone mapper in research
| papers, I'm quite familiar with it and personally know
| all three authors of that paper. I've even written a
| paper or maybe two on color spaces with one of them.
|
| I'm sorry if correcting you triggers insecurities, but if
| you're going to make an appeal to authority, please link
| to your papers instead of hand waving about the people
| you know.
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe outside is "HDR content"? To me that still comes off
| as confused about what HDR is. I know you aren't, but
| that's what it sounds like. A sunny day has a high
| dynamic range for sure, but the acronym HDR is a term of
| art that implies more than that. Your article even
| explains why.
|
| Tone mapping doesn't imply HDR. Tone mapping is always
| present, even in LDR and SDR workflows. The paper you
| cited explicitly notes the idea is to "extend" Adams'
| zone system to very high dynamic range digital images,
| more than what Adams was working with, by implication.
|
| So how is a "window of luminance values" different from a
| dynamic range, exactly? Why did you make the incorrect
| and obviously silly assumption that I was suggesting a
| camera's aperture changes the outdoor scene's dynamic
| range rather than what I actually said, that it changes
| the exposure? Your description of what a camera does is
| functionally identical. I'm kinda baffled as to why
| you're arguing this part that we both understand, using
| hyperbole.
|
| I hope you have a better day tomorrow. Good luck with
| your app. This convo aside, I am honestly rooting for
| you.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > Film negatives have 12-stops of useful dynamic range
|
| No, that's not inherently true. AA used 12 zones, that
| doesn't mean every negative stock has 12 stops of latitude.
| Stocks are different, you need to look at the curves.
|
| But yes most modern negatives are very forgiving. FP4 for
| example has barely any shoulder at all iirc.
| Sharlin wrote:
| No, Adams, like everyone who develops their own film (or RAW
| digital photos) definitely worked in HDR. Film has much more DR
| than photographic paper, as noted by TFA author (and large
| digital sensors more than either SDR or HDR displays)
| _especially_ if you're such a master of exposure as Adams;
| trying to preserve the tonalities when developing and printing
| your photos is the real big issue.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| If I look at one of the photography books in my shelf, they are
| even talking about 18 stops and such for some film material,
| and how this doesn't translate to paper and all the things that
| can be done to render it visible in print and how things behave
| at both extreme ends (towards black and white). Read: Tone-
| mapping (i.e. trimming down a high DR image to a lower DR
| output media) is really old.
|
| The good thing about digital is that it can deal with color at
| decent tonal resolutions (if we assume 16 bits, not the limited
| 14 bit or even less) and in environments where film has
| technical limitations.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| I do prefer the gain map approach myself. Do a sensible '32 bit'
| HDR edit, further tweak an SDR version, and export a file that
| has both.
|
| Creative power is still in your hands versus some tone mapper's
| guesses at your intent.
|
| Can people go overboard? Sure, but thats something they will do
| regardless of any hdr or lack thereof.
|
| On an aside its still rough that just about every site that
| touches gain map (adaptive HDR as this blog calls them) HDR
| images will lose that metadata if they need to scale, recompress,
| or transform the images otherwise. Its led me to just make my own
| site, but also to handle what files a client gets a bit smarter .
| For instance if a browser doesnt support .jxl or .avif images, im
| sure it wont want an hdr jpeg either, thats easy to handle on a
| webserver.
| ddingus wrote:
| Well crap, I had written a thank you, which I will gladly write
| again:
|
| I love when product announcements and ADS in general are high
| value works. This one was good education for me. Thank you for
| it!
|
| I had also written about my plasma and CRT displays and how
| misunderstandings about HDR made things generally worse and how I
| probably have not seen the best these 10 bit capable displays can
| do.
|
| And finally, I had written about 3D TV and how fast, at least
| 60Hz per eye, 3D in my home made for amazing modeling and
| assembly experiences! I was very sad to see that tech dead end.
|
| 3D for technical content create has a lot of legs... if only more
| people could see it running great...
|
| Thanks again. I appreciate the education.
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| I find the default HDR (as in gain map) presentation of iPhone
| photos to look rather garish, rendering highlights too bright and
| distracting from the content of the images. The solution I came
| up with for my own camera app was to roll off and lower the
| highlights in the gain map, which results in final images that I
| find way more pleasing. This seems to be somewhat similar to what
| Halide is introducing with their "Standard" option for HDR.
|
| Hopefully HN allows me to share an App Store link... this app
| works best on Pro iPhones, which support ProRAW, although I do
| some clever stuff on non-Pro iPhones to get a more natural look.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unpro-camera/id6535677796
| springhalo wrote:
| I see that it says it stores images "in an HDR format by
| default" but keeps referencing JPEG output. Are you using JPEG-
| XT? There aren't a lot of "before and after" comparisons so
| it's hard to know how much it's taking out. I figure those
| would probably hurt the reputation of the app considering its
| purpose is to un-pop photos, but I'm in the boat of not really
| being sure whether I do actually like the pop or not. Is there
| live-photo support, or is that something that you shouldn't
| expect from a artist-focused product?
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| It's a JPEG + gain map format where the gain map is stored in
| the metadata. Same thing, as far as I can tell, that Halide
| is now using. It's what the industry is moving towards; it
| means that images display well on both SDR and HDR displays.
| I don't know what JPEG-XT is, aside from what I just skimmed
| on the Wikipedia page.
|
| Not having before-and-after comparisons is mostly down to my
| being concerned about whether that would pass App Review; the
| guidelines indicate that the App Store images are supposed to
| be screenshots of the app, and I'm already pushing that rule
| with the example images for filters. I'm not sure a hubristic
| "here's how much better my photos are than Apple's" image
| would go over well. Maybe in my next update? I should at
| least have some comparisons on my website, but I've been bad
| at keeping that updated.
|
| There's no Live Photo support, though I've been thinking
| about it. The reason is that my current iPhone 14 Pro Max
| does not support Live Photos while shooting in 48-megapixel
| mode; the capture process takes too long. I'd have to come up
| with a compromise such as only having video up to the moment
| of capture. That doesn't prevent me from implementing it for
| other iPhones/cameras/resolutions, but I don't like having
| features unevenly available.
| npteljes wrote:
| I have similar feeling with HDR to what I have with movie audio
| mixing. The range is just too big. I think this distaste also
| amplified in me with age. I appreciate content that makes use of
| the limited space it gets, and also algorithms that compress the
| range for me a bit. KMPlayer for example has this on for volume
| by default, and it makes home movie watching more comfortable, no
| doubt sacrificing artistic vision in the process. I feel a bit
| the same with the loudness war - and maybe a lot of other people
| feel the same too, seeing how compressed audio got. At the very
| least they don't mind much.
|
| I really appreciate the article. I could feel that they also have
| a product to present, because of the many references, but it was
| also very informative besides that.
| caseyy wrote:
| The dad's photo in the end in SDR looks so much better on a
| typical desktop IPS panel (Windows 11). The HDR photo looks like
| the brightness is smushed in the most awful way. On an iPhone,
| the HDR photo is excellent and the others look muted.
|
| I wonder if there's an issue in Windows tonemapping or HDR->SDR
| pipeline, because perceptually the HDR image is really off.
|
| It's more off than if I took an SDR picture of my iPhone showing
| the HDR image and showed that SDR picture on the said Windows
| machine with an IPS panel. Which tells me that the manual
| HDR->SDR "pipeline" I just described is better.
|
| I think Windows showing HDR content on a non-HDR display should
| just pick an SDR-sized section of that long dynamic range and
| show it normally. Without trying to remap the entire large range
| to a smaller one. Or it should do some other perceptual
| improvements.
|
| Then again, I know professionally that Windows HDR is complicated
| and hard to tame. So I'm not really sure the context of remapping
| as they do, maybe it's the only way in some contingency/rare
| scenario.
| fracus wrote:
| The article starts by saying HDR can mean different things and
| gives Apple's HDR vs new TV "HDR" advertsing but doesn't explain
| at all what the TV HDR means and how it is different, unless I
| missed something. I always assumed they were the same thing.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Did I miss something or is the tone mapper not released yet? I
| admit I'm multitasking here, but just have an exposure slider in
| the image lab (or whatever it's called).
|
| Sidebar: I kinda miss when Halide's driving purpose was rapid
| launch and simplicity. I would almost prefer a zoom function to
| all of this HDR gymnastics (though, to be clear, Halide is my
| most-used and most-liked camera app).
|
| EDIT: Ah, I see, it's a Mark III feature. That is not REMOTELY
| clear in the (very long) post.
| neves wrote:
| Interesting these HDR controls of their app Halide. Does Android
| have similar apps?
| mightysashiman wrote:
| I have a question: how can I print HDR? Is there any HDR printer
| + paper + display lighting setup?
|
| My hypothesis are the following:
|
| - Increase display lighting to increase peak white point + use a
| black ink able to absorb more light (can Vantablack-style
| pigments be made into ink?) => increase dynamic range of a
| printable picture
|
| - Alternatively, have the display lighting include visible light
| + invisible UV light, and have the printed picture include an
| invisible layer of UV ink that shines white : the pattern printed
| in invisible UV-ink would be the "gain map" to increase the peak
| brightness past incident visible light into HDR range.
|
| What do you folks think?
| redox99 wrote:
| You would need a very strong light surrounded by a darkish
| environent. I don't see a point in "HDR Paper" if you need to
| place it under a special light.
| mightysashiman wrote:
| usecase: a photo exhibition that wants to show pictures in
| HDR = An HDR print setup (i.e. paper + appropriately
| controlled lighting).
|
| Haven't you ever been to a photo exhibition ?
| grumbel wrote:
| Use projection mapping, instead of lighting the photo
| uniformly, use a projector and project a copy of the image onto
| the photo, thus you get detailed control over how much light
| the parts of the image receive.
|
| Alternatively, use transparent film and a bright backlight.
| labadal wrote:
| Back in university I implemented a shoddy HDR for my phone
| camera.
|
| The hardest part of it, by far, was taking hundreds upon hundreds
| of pictures of a blank piece of paper in different lighting
| conditions with different settings.
| ByteAtATime wrote:
| In my opinion, HDR is another marketing gimmick -- the average
| layman has no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy and is more
| expensive, so surely it's good.
| kristianp wrote:
| A related article on dpreview about Sigmas hdr map in jpegs has
| some tasteful hdr photos. You have to click/tap the photo to see
| the effect.
|
| https://www.dpreview.com/news/7452255382/sigma-brings-hdr-br...
| chaboud wrote:
| Having come from professional video/film tooling in the 90's to
| today, it's interesting to see the evolution of what "HDR" means.
| I used to be a purist in this space, where SDR meant ~8 stops
| (powers of two) or less of dynamic range, and HDR meant 10+.
| Color primaries and transfer function mapping were things I spoke
| specifically about. At this point, though, folks use "HDR" to
| refer to combinations of things.
|
| Around this, a bunch of practical tooling surfaced (e.g., hybrid
| log approaches to luminance mapping) to extend the thinking from
| 8-bit gamma-mapped content presenting ~8 stops of dynamic range
| to where we are now. If we get away from just trying to label
| everyting "HDR", there are some useful things people should
| familiarize with:
|
| 1. Color primaries: examples - SDR: Rec. 601, Rec. 709, sRGB.
| HDR: Rec. 2020, DCI-P3. The new color primaries expand the
| chromatic representation capabilities. This is pretty easy to
| wrap our heads around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020
|
| 2. Transfer functions: examples - SDR: sRGB, BT.1886. HDR: Rec.
| 2100 Perceptual Quantizer (PQ), HLG. The big thing in this space
| to care about is that SDR transfer functions had reference peak
| luminance but were otherwise _relative_ to that peak luminance.
| By contrast, Rec. 2100 PQ code points are absolute, in that each
| code value has a _defined meaning_ in measurable luminance, per
| the PQ EOTF transfer function. This is a _big_ departure from our
| older SDR universe and from Hybrid Log Gamma approaches.
|
| 3. Tone mapping: In SDR, we had the comfort of camera and display
| technologies roughly lining up in the video space, so living in a
| gamma/inverse-gamma universe was fine. We just controlled the
| eccentricity of the curve. Now, with HDR, we have formats that
| can carry tone-mapping information and transports (e.g., HDMI)
| that can bidirectionally signal display target capabilities,
| allowing things like source-based tone mapping. Go digging into
| HDR10+, Dolby Vision, or HDMI SBTM for a deep rabbit hole.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping
|
| So HDR is everything (and nothing), but it's definitely
| important. If I had to emphasize one thing that is non-obvious to
| most new entrants into the space, it's that there are elements of
| description of color and luminance that are _absolute_ in their
| meaning, rather than relative. That 's a substantial shift. Extra
| points for figuring out that practical adaptation to display
| targets is built into formats and protocols.
| squidsoup wrote:
| As a photographer, one of the things that draws me to the work of
| artists like Bill Brandt and Daido Moriyama is their use of low
| dynamic range, and high contrast. I rarely see an HDR image that
| is aesthetically interesting.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Our eyes can see both just fine.
|
| This gets to a gaming rant of mine: Our natural vision can handle
| these things because our eyes scan sections of the scene with
| constant adjustment (light-level, focus) while our brain is
| compositing it together into what feels like a single moment.
|
| However certain effects in games (i.e. "HDR" and Depth of Field)
| instead _reduce_ the fidelity of the experience. These features
| limp along only while our gaze is aimed at the exact spot the
| software expects. If you glance anywhere else around the scene,
| you instead percieve an _unrealistically wrong_ coloration or
| blur that frustratingly persists no matter how much you squint.
| These problems will remain until gaze-tracking support becomes
| standard.
|
| So ultimately these features _reduce_ the realism of the
| experience. They make it less like _being there_ and more like
| you 're watching a second-hand movie recorded on flawed video-
| cameras. This distinction is even clearer if you consider cases
| where "film grain" is added.
| glenngillen wrote:
| I had a similar complaint with the few 3D things I watched when
| that has been hyped in the past (e.g., when Avatar came out in
| cinemas, and when 3D home TVs seemed to briefly become a thing
| 15 years ago). It felt like Hollywood was giving me the freedom
| to immerse myself, but then simultaneously trying to constrain
| that freedom and force me to look at specific things in
| specific ways. I don't know what the specific solution is, but
| it struck me that we needed to be adopting lessons from live
| stage productions more than cinema if you really want people to
| think what they're seeing is real.
| pfranz wrote:
| Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for
| stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get
| it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium
| for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--
| nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a
| _very_ narrow viewing angle).
|
| It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you
| look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something
| that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning
| from one object to another implies a connection. It's built
| on the visual language of still photography (things like rule
| of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc).
| All directing your eye.
|
| Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being
| explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to
| connect something in the foreground to the background. In
| stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the
| camera the same way. In regular film, you could show
| someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off
| at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird.
|
| When you're presenting something you're always directing
| where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or
| stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium.
|
| I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How
| to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like
| rom coms.
| agrnet wrote:
| This is why I always turn off these settings immediately when I
| turn on any video game for the first time. I could never put my
| finger on why I didn't like it, but the camera analogy is
| perfect
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I'm with you on depth of field, but I don't understand why you
| think HDR reduces the fidelity of a game.
|
| If you have a good display (eg an OLED) then the brights are
| brighter and simultaneously there is more detail in the blacks.
| Why do you think that is worse than SDR?
| pfranz wrote:
| Check out this old post:
| https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
|
| HDR in games would frequently mean clipping highlights and
| adding bloom. Prior the "HDR" exposure looked rather flat.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| OK, so it doesn't mean real HDR but simulated HDR.
|
| Maybe when proper HDR support becomes mainstream in 3D
| engines, that problem will go away.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| It's HDR at the world data level, but SDR at the
| rendering level. It's simulating the way film cannot
| handle real-life high dynamic range and clips it instead
| of compressing it like "HDR" in photography.
| nomel wrote:
| > Instead of compressing it like "HDR" in photography
|
| That's not HDR either, that's tone mapping to SDR. The
| entire point of HDR is that you _don 't need_ to compress
| it because your display can actually make use of the
| extra bits of information. Most modern phones take true
| HDR pictures that look great on an HDR display.
| majormajor wrote:
| That's not what it means since 2016 or so when consumer TVs
| got support for properly displaying brighter whites and
| colors.
|
| It definitely adds detail now, and for the last 8-9 years.
|
| Though consumer TVs obviously still fall short of being as
| bright at peak as the real world. (We'll probably never
| want our TV to burn out our vision like the sun, though,
| but probably hitting highs at least in the 1-2000nit range
| vs the 500-700 that a lot peak at right now would be nice
| for most uses.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The "HDR" here is in the sense of "tone mapping to SDR".
| Should also be said that even "H" DR displays only have a
| stop or two of more range, still much less than in a real-
| world high-contrast scenes
| brokenmachine wrote:
| It's still better though.
|
| HDR displays are >1000nits while SDR caps out at less than
| 500nits even on the best displays.
|
| Eg for the Samsung s90c, HDR is 1022nits, SDR is 487nits: h
| ttps://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/s90c-oled#test_608
| https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/s90c-oled#test_4
|
| Double the range is undeniably still better.
|
| And also 10bit instead of 8bit, so less posterization as
| well.
|
| Just because the implementations have been subpar until now
| doesn't mean it's worthless tech to pursue.
| pfranz wrote:
| https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
|
| It's crazy that post is 15 years old. Like the OP and this post
| get at, HDR isn't really a good description of what's
| happening. HDR often means one or more of at least 3 different
| things (capture, storage, and presentation). It's just the
| sticker slapped on advertising.
|
| Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow
| depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there
| is like--but from a narrative perspective we experience a lot
| of these things through tv and film. Its visual shorthand. Like
| Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica copying WWII dogfight footage
| even though it's less like what it would be like if you were
| there. High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel
| premium and "filmic."
|
| Often those limitations are in place so the experience is
| consistent for everyone. Games will have you set brightness and
| contrast--I had friends that would crank everything up to avoid
| jump scares and to clearly see objects intended to be hidden in
| shadows. Another reason for consistent presentation is for
| unfair advantages in multiplayer.
| wickedsight wrote:
| > the poster found it via StumbleUpon.
|
| Such a blast from the past, I used to spend so much time just
| clicking that button!
| arghwhat wrote:
| > Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and
| shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what
| being there is like
|
| Ignoring film grain, our vision has all these effects all the
| same.
|
| Look in front of you and only a single plane will be in focus
| (and only your fovea produces any sort of legibility). Look
| towards a bright light and you might get flaring from just
| your eyes. Stare out the side of a car or train when driving
| at speed and you'll see motion blur, interrupted only by
| brief clarity if you intentionally try to follow the motion
| with your eyes.
|
| Without depth of field simulation, the whole scene is just a
| flat plane with completely unrealistic clarity, and because
| it's comparatively small, too much of it is smack center on
| your fovea. The problem is that these are simulations that do
| not track your eyes, and make the (mostly valid!) assumption
| that you're looking, nearby or in front of whatever you're
| controlling.
|
| Maybe motion blur becomes unneccessary given a high enough
| resolution and refresh rate, but depth of field either
| requires actual depth or foveal tracking (which only works
| for one person). Tasteful application of current techniques
| is probably better.
|
| > High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel
| premium and "filmic."
|
| Ugh. I will never understand the obsession this effect. There
| is no such thing as a "soap opera effect" as people liek to
| call it, only a slideshow effect.
|
| The history behind this is purely a series of cost-cutting
| measures entirely unrelated to the user experience or
| artistic qualities. 24 fps came to be because audio was
| slapped onto the film, and was the slowest speed where the
| audio track was acceptable intelligible, saving costly film
| paper - the _sole_ priority of the time. Before that, we used
| to record content at variable frame rates but play it back at
| 30-40 fps.
|
| We're clinging on to a cost-cutting measure that was a
| significant compromise from the time of hand cranked film
| recording.
|
| </fist-shaking rant>
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Look in front of you and only a single plane will be in
| focus (and only your fovea produces any sort of
| legibility). Look towards a bright light and you might get
| flaring from just your eyes. Stare out the side of a car or
| train when driving at speed and you'll see motion blur,
| interrupted only by brief clarity if you intentionally try
| to follow the motion with your eyes.
|
| The problem is the mismatch between what you're looking at
| on the screen and what the in-game camera is looking at. If
| these were synchronised perfectly it wouldn't be a problem.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Indeed - I also mentioned that in the paragraph
| immediately following.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Derp
| 7bit wrote:
| Ok. I like depth of field and prefer it.
| kookamamie wrote:
| HDR, not "HDR", is the biggest leap in gaming visuals made in
| the last 10 years, I think.
|
| Sure, you need a good HDR-capable display and a native HDR-game
| (or RTX HDR), but the results are pretty awesome.
| baxuz wrote:
| These effects are for the artistic intent of the game. Same
| goes for movies, and has nothing to do with "second hand movies
| recorded on flawed cameras". or with "realism" in the sense of
| how we perceive the world.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The most egregious example is 3D. Only one thing is in focus,
| even though the scene is stereoscopic. It makes no sense
| visually.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Hell yeah, this one of many issues I had with the first
| Avatar movie. The movie was so filled with cool things to
| look at but none of it was in focus. 10 minutes in I had had
| enough and was ready for a more traditional movie experience.
| Impressive yes, for 10 minutes, then exhausting.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hah - Avatar was exactly what I was thinking of.
| jedbrooke wrote:
| this thread is helping me understand why I always thought
| 3D movies looked _less_ 3D than 2D movies.
|
| That and after seeing Avatar 1 in 3D, then seeing Avatar 2
| in 3D over 10 years later and not really noticing any
| improvement in the 3D made me declare 3D movies officially
| dead (though I haven't done side by side comparisons)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Half life 2 lost coast was exciting
|
| Glad all this "Instagram influences searing eyeballs with bright
| whites" is news to me. All I know about is QR code mode doing
| that.
| sn0n wrote:
| Tldr; lots of vivid colors.
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| Digital camera technology is so fascinating.
| shrx wrote:
| Question to the author: Why are the images in the "Solution 2:
| Genuine HDR Displays" section actually videos? E.g.
| <video src="https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-
| york-skyline-hdr.mp4"
| poster="https://img.spacergif.org/v1/4032x3024/0a/spacer.png"
| width="4032" height="3024" loop="" autoplay="" muted=""
| playsinline="" preload="metadata" style="background: transparent
| url('https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-york-
| skyline-hdr_thumb.jpg') 50% 50% / cover no-repeat;"></video>
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Your question is answered in the article.
|
| Look for the word video.
| shrx wrote:
| Yes but I'm interested in the technical reasons.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Safari doesn't support HDR images and there's no
| particularly good reason for it.
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