What is HDR, anyway?

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 15, 2025, 8:10 AM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #153

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…

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 conte…

Post by dmos62 » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #112

dmos62 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Post by spookie » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

asafira wrote: post #72

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:/…

Post by casey2 » Thu, May 15, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

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…

Post by dpacmittal » Thu, May 15, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #65

echo_time wrote: post #7

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?

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 i…