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What is HDR, anyway?

lux.camera

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Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#91

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?

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I think you may be operating with an idiosyncratic definition of "colloquial"

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#93

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…

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 t…

HDR on desktop in windows looks straight up broken on some HDR monitors I’ve tried

Like totally washed out

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#94
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?

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#95
post #82
post #5

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 th…

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.

>HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm.

I think it's because no one wants it.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#96
post #5

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 th…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#97
post #22

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…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#98
post #88
post #62

> 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…

> 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 wh…

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).

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#100
post #82
post #5

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 th…

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.

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