7 ms·

Apple did a clever thing with HDR content where it can appear amongst other non-HDR content, and only the part of the screen displaying the HDR content is in HD

by hbn 3y ago

Apple did a clever thing with HDR content where it can appear amongst other non-HDR content, and only the part of the screen displaying the HDR content is in HDR. But in practice it looks really bad and I hate every time I'm scrolling Instagram and an HDR video appears in my feed. It blows my eyes out and then the rest of my screen looks gray and muted for a few seconds until I get the HDR content off my screen.

flutas 3y ago
Yup, exactly the same impression for me. To me it doesn't make HDR content look better, but it makes the non HDR content around it just look worse.
- hbn 3y ago
  Honestly I think it kind of makes both look bad. Everything else looks muted, but also the HDR content itself looks cartoonishly over-saturated because your eyes are not in the context of seeing colors like that on your screen as it is.
whalesalad 3y ago
Always wondered wtf was going on here and now it makes sense.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
My opinion of this way of handling HDR is kinda mixed when it comes to phones, but on computers and tablets I prefer it to the way that e.g. Windows handles HDR, where non-HDR parts of the screen look weirdly dim, which makes you want to only turn HDR on when running a game that supports it or something like that.
- LelouBil 3y ago
  I have this only when turning on HDR in windows, but not in my screen. When both are on, it's good.
mrtksn 3y ago
When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Especially videos which have bright sun illuminating some surfaces and other surfaces are in the shadows. It really looks like the sun is shining, I can feel the endorphin is shooting through my veins. However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.
- dheera 3y ago
  Easily doable on non-Apple displays. (a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits. (b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255] to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them. (c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect of (b) under most circumstances. (c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your face. In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    This sounds to me like it would be a very poor approximation of how EDR works on Apple displays.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2. someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
- thrashh 3y ago
  I have to agree with the iPhone camera in bright settings. It doesn’t look good. Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my digital camera and the photos will come out really good. It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are technically limited in capturing it. A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you can get way better results with digital if you know what to do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.
kccqzy 3y ago
Fortunately turning on Low Power Mode disables that nonsense. Might as well save some battery while getting rid of this eye-scorching white.
- toxik 3y ago
  It in fact still works in low power mode.
Joeri 3y ago
Actually the whole screen is HDR, but the non-HDR parts are dimmed to match their normal brightness. They can do this because they calibrate their displays and know exactly how bright they are. By the way, if brightness is not maxed this works even on the 400 nits macbook air m1, which they call EDR. They ramp up to max brightness and dim the non-HDR parts.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air), they must be leaving some brightness margin to allow for this to work on any brightness level - maybe except for outdoor lighting conditions? I had to blast the ambient light sensor with my phone's flash to get the screen bright enough so that the HDR content disappears. When the auto-brightness is turned off, you can still see the HDR content up until the top settings, just one bar down is enough to display it. The switch from SDR to HDR is also interesting, when an HDR content is to be displayed it slowly fades into HDR. It must be tamping up the backlight of the LCD when tinting the SDR content simultaneously to create the gradual brightness increase effect in the HDR areas. The fact that the SDR area doesn't flicker when this happens, gives me the impression that the Apple do amazing screen calibration.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air) No it doesn't, I'm trying it out right now on my M1 Air. If my screen brightness is max, the video isn't extra-bright in Chrome or in Safari. If I turn down the screen brightness, it does stand out. I don't know what you're talking about having to "blast the ambient light sensor" to get your screen to max brightness, that's not how my M1 Air works and it's not how any Mac laptop is supposed to work. That's used for "Automatically adjust brightness" (which I have on) but that's overridden at any moment just by using the brightness buttons on your keyboard to turn it up to the max. So I'm not sure how you think you've got your brightness "maxed out" but it seems you don't. You might have some other setting preventing it, like automatic screen dimming in battery mode.
    - 3y ago
munchler 3y ago
So it’s basically the Spinal Tap “amp goes to 11” for displays? Genius.
kllrnohj 3y ago
Android does this as well now, depending on device support https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-hdr https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-hdr
cornstalks 3y ago
Part of the problem is mobile devices often grade their videos “too hot.” This Demuxed[1] talk has a pretty good overview of the problem in the industry and ideas for improving it (and to avoid confusion, the talk is given from the perspective of someone in the future looking back on HDR in the industry). [1]: https://youtu.be/bYS-P2bF2TQ https://youtu.be/bYS-P2bF2TQ
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by hbn 3y ago

flutas 3y ago

Yup, exactly the same impression for me. To me it doesn't make HDR content look better, but it makes the non HDR content around it just look worse.

hbn 3y ago
Honestly I think it kind of makes both look bad. Everything else looks muted, but also the HDR content itself looks cartoonishly over-saturated because your eyes are not in the context of seeing colors like that on your screen as it is.

whalesalad 3y ago

Always wondered wtf was going on here and now it makes sense.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

My opinion of this way of handling HDR is kinda mixed when it comes to phones, but on computers and tablets I prefer it to the way that e.g. Windows handles HDR, where non-HDR parts of the screen look weirdly dim, which makes you want to only turn HDR on when running a game that supports it or something like that.

LelouBil 3y ago
I have this only when turning on HDR in windows, but not in my screen. When both are on, it's good.

mrtksn 3y ago

When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Especially videos which have bright sun illuminating some surfaces and other surfaces are in the shadows. It really looks like the sun is shining, I can feel the endorphin is shooting through my veins. However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.

dheera 3y ago
Easily doable on non-Apple displays. (a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits. (b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255] to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them. (c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect of (b) under most circumstances. (c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your face. In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
- saagarjha 3y ago
  This sounds to me like it would be a very poor approximation of how EDR works on Apple displays.
rollcat 3y ago
> When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2. someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
thrashh 3y ago
I have to agree with the iPhone camera in bright settings. It doesn’t look good. Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my digital camera and the photos will come out really good. It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are technically limited in capturing it. A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you can get way better results with digital if you know what to do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.

kccqzy 3y ago

Fortunately turning on Low Power Mode disables that nonsense. Might as well save some battery while getting rid of this eye-scorching white.

toxik 3y ago
It in fact still works in low power mode.

Joeri 3y ago

Actually the whole screen is HDR, but the non-HDR parts are dimmed to match their normal brightness. They can do this because they calibrate their displays and know exactly how bright they are. By the way, if brightness is not maxed this works even on the 400 nits macbook air m1, which they call EDR. They ramp up to max brightness and dim the non-HDR parts.

mrtksn 3y ago
It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air), they must be leaving some brightness margin to allow for this to work on any brightness level - maybe except for outdoor lighting conditions? I had to blast the ambient light sensor with my phone's flash to get the screen bright enough so that the HDR content disappears. When the auto-brightness is turned off, you can still see the HDR content up until the top settings, just one bar down is enough to display it. The switch from SDR to HDR is also interesting, when an HDR content is to be displayed it slowly fades into HDR. It must be tamping up the backlight of the LCD when tinting the SDR content simultaneously to create the gradual brightness increase effect in the HDR areas. The fact that the SDR area doesn't flicker when this happens, gives me the impression that the Apple do amazing screen calibration.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air) No it doesn't, I'm trying it out right now on my M1 Air. If my screen brightness is max, the video isn't extra-bright in Chrome or in Safari. If I turn down the screen brightness, it does stand out. I don't know what you're talking about having to "blast the ambient light sensor" to get your screen to max brightness, that's not how my M1 Air works and it's not how any Mac laptop is supposed to work. That's used for "Automatically adjust brightness" (which I have on) but that's overridden at any moment just by using the brightness buttons on your keyboard to turn it up to the max. So I'm not sure how you think you've got your brightness "maxed out" but it seems you don't. You might have some other setting preventing it, like automatic screen dimming in battery mode.
  - 3y ago

munchler 3y ago

So it’s basically the Spinal Tap “amp goes to 11” for displays? Genius.

kllrnohj 3y ago

Android does this as well now, depending on device support https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-hdr https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-hdr

cornstalks 3y ago

Part of the problem is mobile devices often grade their videos “too hot.” This Demuxed[1] talk has a pretty good overview of the problem in the industry and ideas for improving it (and to avoid confusion, the talk is given from the perspective of someone in the future looking back on HDR in the industry). [1]: https://youtu.be/bYS-P2bF2TQ https://youtu.be/bYS-P2bF2TQ

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]