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/