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What is HDR, anyway?

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Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#141

Post by ddingus »

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#142

Post by mxfh »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #136
aidenn0 wrote: 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…

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.

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#143

Post by albumen »

dahart wrote: post #123

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…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#144

Post by kjkjadksj »

alerighi wrote: post #98
gwbas1c wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#145

Post by mrandish »

sandofsky wrote: post #21
gyomu wrote: 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…

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,…

> 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).

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#146

Post by Suppafly »

altairprime wrote: post #131
Suppafly wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. I think it's because no one wants it.

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 p…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#147

Post by kjkjadksj »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#148

Post by ddingus »

scraptor wrote: post #106
tart-lemonade wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

The client side toggle might be new since 2024 but the volume normalisation has been a thing for a long time.

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.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#149

Post by Uncorrelated »

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

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#150

Post by npteljes »

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.

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