23 ms·

What is HDR, anyway?

806 points by _kush 1y ago

esperent 1y ago
This page crashed Brave on Android three times before I gave up.
- mcjiggerlog 1y ago
  For me this crashed in android webview, android chrome, and android firefox. Impressive.
- breytex 1y ago
  Same for me. Pixel 8, chrome
4ad 1y ago
HDR is just a scene-referred image using absolute luminance.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  Not in the more general sense! It can refer to what its acronym spells out directly: Bigger range between dimmest and brightest capabilities of a display, imaging technique etc.
  - 4ad 1y ago
    No. HDR can encode high dynamic range because (typically) it uses floating point encoding. From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-referred images and video, along with a set of standards for reproduction.
    - cornstalks 1y ago
      No. HDR video (and images) don't use floating point encoding. They generally use a higher bit depth (10 bits or more vs 8 bits) to reduce banding and different transfer characteristics (i.e. PQ or HLG vs sRGB or BT.709), in addition to different YCbCr matrices and mastering metadata. And no, it's not necessarily absolute luminance. PQ is absolute, HLG is not.
      - skhameneh 1y ago
        Isn’t HLG using floating point(s)? Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR. I would share more insight, if I had it. I thought I understood color profiles well, but I have encountered some challenges when trying to display in one, edit in another, and print “correctly”. And every device seems to treat color profiles a little bit differently.
        kllrnohj 1y ago
        > Isn’t HLG using floating point(s)? All transfer functions can generally work on either integer range or floating point. They basically just describe a curve shape, and you can have that curve be over the range of 0.0-1.0 just as easily as you can over 0-255 or 0-1023. Extended sRGB is about the only thing that basically requires floating point, as it specifically describes 0.0-1.0 as being equivalent to sRGB and then has a valid range larger than that (you end up with something like -.8 to 2.4 or greater). And representing that in integer domain is conceptually possible but practically not really. > Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR. BT2020 is the most standardized color space for HDR. DCI-P3 is the most common color gamut of HDR displays that you can actually afford, however, but that's a smaller gamut than what most HDR profiles expect (HDR10, HDR10+, and "professional" DolbyVision are all BT2020 - a wider gamut than P3). Which also means most HDR content specifies a color gamut it doesn't actually benefit from having as all that HDR content is still authored to only use somewhere between the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamut since that's all anyone who views it will actually have.
        cornstalks 1y ago
        You can read the actual HLG spec here: https://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/doc/2-STD-B67v2_0.pdf https://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/doc/2-STD-B67v2... The math uses real numbers but table 2-4 ("Digital representation") discusses how the signal is quantized to/from analog and digital. The signal is quantized to integers. This same quantization process is done for sRGB, BT.709, BT.2020, etc. so it's not unique to HLG. It's just how digital images/video are stored.
    - dahart 1y ago
      I think most HDR formats do not typically use 32 bit floating point. The first HDR file format I can remember is Greg Ward’s RGBE format, which is also now more commonly known as .HDR and I think is pretty widely used. https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html It uses a type of floating point, in a way, but it’s a shared 8 bit exponent across all 3 channels, and the channels are still 8 bits each, so the whole thing fits in 32 bits. Even the .txt file description says it’s not “floating point” per-se since that implies IEEE single precision floats. Cameras and displays don’t typically use floats, and even CG people working in HDR and using, e.g., OpenEXR, might use half floats more often that float. Some standards do exist, and it’s improving over time, but the ideas and execution of HDR in various ways preceded any standards, so I think it’s not helpful to define HDR as a set of standards. From my perspective working in CG, HDR began as a way to break away from 8 bits per channel RGB, and it included improving both color range and color resolution, and started the discussion of using physical metrics as opposed to relative [0..1] ranges.
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  No, it isn't. Absolute luminance is a "feature" of PQ specifically used by HDR10(+) and most DolbyVision content (notably the DolbyVision as produced by an iPhone is not PQ, it's not "real" DolbyVision). But this is not the only form of HDR and it's not even the common form for phone cameras. HLG is a lot more popular for cameras and it is not in absolute luminance. The gainmap-based approach that Google, Apple, and Adobe are all using is also very much not absolute luminance, either. In fact that flips it entirely and it's SDR relative instead, which is a much better approach to HDR than what video initially went with.
- pavlov 1y ago
  Ideally in the abstract it could be just that, but in practice it's an umbrella name for many different techniques that provide some aspect of that goal.
CarVac 1y ago
HDR on displays is actually largely uncomfortable for me. They should reserve the brightest HDR whites for things like the sun itself and caustics, not white walls in indoor photos. As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.
- NBJack 1y ago
  HDR is really hard to get right apparently. It seems to get worse in video games too. I'm a huge fan of Helldivers 2, but playing the game in HDR gives me a headache: the muzzle flash of weapons at high RPMs on a screen that goes to 240hz is basically a continuous flashbang for my eyes. For a while, No Mans' Sky in HDR mode was basically the color saturation of every planet dialed up to 11. The only game I've enjoyed at HDR was a port from a console, Returnal. The use of HDR brights was minimalistic and tasteful, often reserved for certain particle effects.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    For a year or two after it launched, The Division 2 was a really, really good example of HDR done right. The game had (has?) a day/night cycle, and it had a really good control of the brightness throughout the day. More importantly, it made very good use of the wide color gamut available to it. I stopped playing that game for several years, and when I went back to it, the color and brightness had been wrecked to all hell. I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's part of why they ruined their game's renderer. Some games that I think currently have good HDR: * Lies of P * Hunt: Showdown 1896 * Monster Hunter: World (if you increase the game's color saturation a bit from its default settings) Some games that had decent-to-good HDR the last time I played them, a few years ago: * Battlefield 1 * Battlefield V * Battlefield 2042 (If you're looking for a fun game, I do NOT recommend this one. Also, the previous two are probably chock-full of cheaters these days.) I found Helldivers 2's HDR mode to have blacks that were WAY too bright. In SDR mode, nighttime in forest areas was dark. In HDR mode? It was as if you were standing in the middle of a field during a full moon.
    - 1y ago
the__alchemist 1y ago
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 phone or PC screen. The pic fails to capture what your eyes see for lighting range.
- aethrum 1y ago
  For gaming, definitely. An HDR Oled monitor is so immersive.
- esperent 1y ago
  I think it depends on the screen and also what you use it for. My OLED is unusable for normal work in HDR because it's designed around only a small portion of the screen being at max brightness - reasonable for a game or movie, but the result is that a small window with white background will look really bright, but if I maximize it, it'll look washed out, grey not white. Also the maximum brightness isn't even that bright at 800 nits, so no HDR content really looks that different. I think newer OLEDs are brighter though. I'm still happy with the screen in general, even in SDR the OLED really shines. But it made me aware not all HDR screens are equal. Also, in my very short experiment using HDR for daily work I ran into several problems, the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    > ...the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer. To be pedantic, this has always been the case... Who the hell knows what bonkers "color enhancement" your recipient has going on on their end? But (more seriously) it's very, very stupid that most systems out there will ignore color profile data embedded in pictures (and many video players ignore the same in videos [0]). It's quite possible to tone-map HDR stuff so it looks reasonable on SDR displays, but color management is like accessibility in that nearly noone who's in charge of paying for software development appears to give any shits about it. [0] A notable exception to this is MPV. I can't recommend this video player highly enough.
gyomu 1y ago
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 the HDR photos I had to turn down my display even more to not strain my eyes, then back up again when I scrolled to the text. For fullscreen content (games, movies) HDR is alright, but for everyday computing it's a pretty jarring experience as a user.
- beachwood23 1y ago
  Completely agree. To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. I set my screen brightness to a certain level for a reason. Please don’t just arbitrarily turn up the brightness! There is no good way to disable HDR on photos for iPhone, either. Sure, you can turn off the HDR on photos on your iphone. But then, when you cast to a different display, the TV tries to display the photos in HDR, and it won’t look half as good.
  - repelsteeltje 1y ago
    > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. You might be on to something there. Technically, HDR is mostly about profile signaling and therefore about interop. To support it in mpeg dash or hls media you need to make sure certain codec attributes are mentioned in the xml or m3u8 but the actual media payload stays the same. Any bit or Bob being misconfigured or misinterpreted in the streaming pipeline will result in problems ranging from slightly suboptimal experience to nothing works. Besides HDR, "spatial audio" formats like Dolby Atmos are notorious for interop isuues
  - kllrnohj 1y ago
    > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. On both Android & iOS/MacOS it's not that HDR is ignoring your screen brightness, but rather the brightness slider is controlling the SDR range and then yes HDR can exceed that, that's the singular purpose of HDR to be honest. All the other purported benefits of HDR are at best just about HDR video profiles and at worst just nonsense bullshit. The only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter colors vs. SDR. When used selectively this really enhances a scene. But restraint is hard, and most forms of HDR content production are shit. The HDR images that newer iPhones and Pixel phones are capturing are generally quite good because they are actually restrained, but then ironically both of them have horrible HDR video that's just obnoxiously bright.
echo_time 1y ago
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?
- viraptor 1y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr there's the tracking issue for HDR support.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Tbh, I'm glad this isn't supported in Firefox as of right now
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Can confirm on Windows 11 with HDR enabled on my display— I see the photos in the article correctly on Chrome and they're a grey mess on Firefox.
  - lloeki 1y ago
    On macOS even without HDR enabled on my display there's a striking difference due to better tone mapping between Safari and Firefox. If I enable HDR the Firefox ones become a gray mess vs the lights feeling like actual lights in Safari.
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  For what it's worth, your comment has me convinced I just "can't see" HDR properly because I have the same page side-by-side on Firefox and Chrome on my M4 MBP and honestly? Can't see the difference. edit: Ah, nevermind. It seems Firefox is doing some sort of post-processing (maybe bad tonemapping?) on-the-fly as the pictures start out similar but degrade to washed out after some time. In particular, the "OVERTHROW BOXING CLUB" photo makes this quite apparent. That's a damn shame Firefox. C'mon, HDR support feels like table stakes at this point. edit2: Apparently it's not table stakes. > Browser support is halfway there. Google beat Apple to the punch with their own version of Adaptive HDR they call Ultra HDR, which Chrome 14 now supports. Safari has added HDR support into its developer preview, then it disabled it, due to bugs within iOS. at which point I would just say to `lux.camera` authors - why not put a big fat warning at the top for users with a Firefox or Safari (stable) browser? With all the emphasis on supposedly simplifying a difficult standard, the article has fallen for one of its most famous pitfalls. "It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people." Yep, and you've made it even worse for a huge chunk of people. :shrug: Great article n' all just saying.
sebstefan 1y ago
For the Halide's updated Image Lab demo about 2/3rd of the way down the page (https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-trimmed.mp4 https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-tr...), you made the demo so tall desktop users can't both see the sky & the controls at the same time A lot of these design flaws are fixed by Firefox's picture in picture option but for some reason, with the way you coded it, the prompt to pop it out as PIP doesn't show up
mxfh 1y ago
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 out my eyes in actual HDR display. It is here, where you, the consumer, are as vulnerable to light in a proper dark environment for movie watching, as when raising the window curtains on a bright summer morning. (That brightness abuse by content is actually discussed here) Dolby Vision and Apple have the lead here as a closed platforms, on the web it's simply not predictably possible yet. Best hope is the efforts of the Color on the Web Community Group from my impression. https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG
- lordleft 1y ago
  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.
  - mort96 1y ago
    When I complain about HDR it's because I've intentionally set the brightness of pure white to a comfortable level, and then suddenly parts of my screen are brighter than that. You fundamentally can't solve that problem with just better tone mapping, can you?
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      You can for some definition of "solve", by tone-mapping all HDR content back down into an SDR range for display.
      - mort96 1y ago
        Well yeah. I considered adding that caveat but elected not to because it's obvious and doesn't add anything to the conversation, since that's obviously not what's meant when the industry talks about "HDR". Should've remembered this is HN.
sergioisidoro 1y ago
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 higher dynamic range in analog photos. About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. I find they are good at capturing family moments, but not as a creative tool.
- CarVac 1y ago
  I wrote a raw processing app Filmulator that simulates stand development/compensating developers to give such an effect to digital photography. I still use it myself but I need to redo the build system and release it with an updated LibRaw... not looking forward to that.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  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.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  > About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. HDR is what enables you to capture both the darkest shadow detail and the brightest highlight detail. With SDR, one or both are often simply just lost. It might come down to preference — if you're an "auto" shooter and like the effect of the visual information at the edges of the available dynamic range being truncated, SDR is for you. Some people prefer to capture that detail and have the ability to decide whether and how to diminish or remove it, with commensurately more control over the artistic impact. For those folks, HDR is highly desirable.
dsego 1y ago
Isn't the result of their tone mapping algo similar to adjusting shadow and highlight sliders in other software?
- sandofsky 1y ago
  No. When you simply adjust shadow and highlights, you lose local contrast. In an early draft of the post, there was an example, but it was cut for pacing.
fogleman 1y ago
So, if cameras have poor dynamic range, how are they getting away with a single exposure? They didn't explain that at all...
- sandofsky 1y ago
  Human vision has around 20 stops of static dynamic range. Modern digital cameras can't match human vision— a $90,000 Arri Alexa boasts 17 stops— but they're way better than SDR screens.
cainxinth 1y ago
I chuckled at "The Ed Hardy t-shirt of photography" for the early, overdone "HDR-mode" images.
perching_aix 1y ago
I'm not entirely convinced that greedy influencers are to blame for people hating on overly bright content. Instead, I think something is different with how displays produce brightness compared to just the nature outside. Light outside is supposed to reach up to tens of thousands of nits, yet even 1000 nits is searing on a display. Is it that displays output polarized light? Is it the spectral distribution of especially the better displays being three really tight peaks? I cannot tell you, but I'm suspecting something isn't quite right. All this aside, HDR and high brightness are different things - HDR is just a representational thing. You can go full send on your SDR monitor as well, you'll just see more banding. The majority of the article is just content marketing about how they perform automatic tonemapping anyways.
- ziml77 1y ago
  It's all down to the ambient light. That's why bias lighting is now a thing. Try putting a light behind your screen to massively brighten the wall behind it, the 1000 nit peaks will be far less harsh. And if you bring the device out into sunlight I suspect you will wish for everything about its output to be quite a bit brighter.
- layer8 1y ago
  > Light outside is supposed to reach up to tens of thousands of nits, yet even 1000 nits is searing on a display. That’s a consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye). If you look at 1000 nits on a display in bright sunlight, with your eyes adapted to the bright surroundings, the display would look rather dim.
therealmarv 1y ago
... something Linux Desktops don't understand and Macs only do well with their own displays with videos. Guess who the winner is on the desktop: Windows oO
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Linux does HDR. It's *technically" worked for years but none of the big DEs had it working. Now Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 (Gnome) have it working out of the box.
  - therealmarv 1y ago
    ha, interesting. thanks!
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  HDR on my MacBook means play the youtube video at full brightness no matter how dim I’ve made the screen. It’s infuriating. e.g. Open this in macOS Chrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq7H6PI4JF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq7H6PI4JF8
bookofjoe 1y ago
As a non-techie I represent the 99.9% of the population who haven't a clue what tone mapping etc. is: NO WAY would we ever touch the various settings possible as opposed to watching the TV/computer screen/etc. as it came out of the box.
c-fe 1y ago
i am still skeptical about HDR as pretty much all HDR content I see online is awful. But this post makes me believe that Lux/Halide can pull of HDR in a way that I will like. I am looking forward to Halide Mk3.
alistairSH 1y ago
"The Ed Hardy T-Shirt of Photography" Literal snort.
randall 1y ago
This was super awesome. Thanks for this! Especially the HDR photo reveal felt really awesome.
aidenn0 1y ago
> 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 screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.
- dmitshur 1y ago
  To demonstrate some contrast (heh) with another data point from someone closer to the other extreme, I’ve owned a very HDR-capable monitor (the Apple Pro Display XDR) since 2020, so that’s 5 years now. Content that takes full advantage of it is still rare, but it’s getting better slowly over time.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    I have a screen which is "HDR" but what that means is when you turn the feature on it just makes everything more muted, it doesn't actually have any more dynamic range. When you turn HDR on for a game it basically just makes most things more muddy grey. I also have a screen which has a huge gamut and blows out colors in a really nice way (a bit like the aftereffects of hallucinogens, it has colors other screens just don't) and you don't have to touch any settings. My OLED TV has HDR and it actually seems like HDR content makes a difference while regular content is still "correct".
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      The cheap displays adding broken HDR400 support destroyed so much public opinion on HDR. Not actually providing a wider range but accepting the HDR signal would at least have been a minor improvement if the tone mapping weren't completely broken to the point most people just associate HDR with a washed out picture.
      - 1y ago
tomatotomato37 1y ago
If anyone was hoping for a more technical explanation, I find these pages do a good job explaining the inner workings behind the format https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth.... https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_space_size.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac... https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_linear_painting.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...
asafira 1y ago
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY_hJ8FVpJ4fEFDe4XC9SDFW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
- brcmthrowaway 1y ago
  Pixel camera hardware or software? Isnt there only one vendor for sensors - Sony?
  - dawidpotocki 1y ago
    Samsung also makes sensors for phones. IIRC some Pixels use their sensors.
    - xattt 1y ago
      Is Sony the ASML of the sensor world?
      - brcmthrowaway 1y ago
        Definitely
    - hypercube33 1y ago
      I think Canon makes at least some of their sensors, and Nikon designs theirs and makes it at a third party I forget the name of that isn't Sony or Samsung but they still do use Sony stuff in a lot of their cameras. I don't know about Pentax, Panasonic or OMD (formerly Olympus)
hatsunearu 1y ago
Is there any workflow that can output HDR photos (like the real HDR kind, with metadata to tell the display to go into HDR mode) for photos shot with a mirrorless and not an iPhone?
- Uncorrelated 1y ago
  Yes. For example, Lightroom and Camera Raw support HDR editing and export from RAW images, and Adobe published a good rundown on the feature when they introduced it. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained Greg Benz Photography maintains a list of software here: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/ https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/ I'm not sure what FOSS options there are; it's difficult to search for given that "HDR" can mean three or four different things in common usage.
gwbas1c 1y ago
> AI cannot read your mind, so it cannot honor your intent. This. I can always tell when someone "gets" software development when they either understand (or don't) that computers can't read minds or infer intent like a person can.
NelsonMinar 1y ago
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?
- lloeki 1y ago
  Yes, and not just static but dynamic properties: https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/ https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  this isn't a correct definition. human perception of brightness is roughly logarithmic, so it also matters how deep the blacks get. For a good HDR experience, you need a monitor that gets to 600 nits at a bare minimum, but also which can get very close to 0 nits (e.g. via OLED or less optionally local dimming)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
caseyy 1y ago
HDR is when you’re watching a dark film at night, looking at the subtle nuances between shades of dark and black in the shadows on the screen, making out the faint contours the film director carefully curated, and the subtitles gently deposit 40W of light into your optical nerves with “♪”.
- shrx 1y ago
  I actually kind of hate the fact that the subtitles on my (SDR) OLED display never get as bright as some parts of the video itself.
dahart 1y ago
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 lose color resolution in super dark color. As a photographer, with HDR you can re-expose the image when you display/print it, where previously that wasn’t possible. Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing HDR gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom, allowing them to adjust exposure after the fact. Ansel Adams wasn’t using HDR in the same sense we’re talking about, he was just really good at capturing the right exposure for his medium without needing to adjust it later. There is a very valid argument to be made for doing the work up-front to capture what you’re after, but ignoring that for a moment, it is simply not possible to re-expose Adams’ negatives to reveal color detail he didn’t capture. That’s why he’s not using HDR, and why saying he is will only further muddy the water.
- QuantumGood 1y ago
  Adams adjusted heavily with dodging and burning, even working to invent a new chemical process to provide more control when developing. He was great at determining exposure for his process as well. A key skill was having a vision for what the image would be after adjusting. Adams talked a lot about this as a top priority of his process.
  - Demiurge 1y ago
    > It's even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens! I came here to point this out. You have a pretty high dynamic range in the captured medium, and then you can use the tools you have to darken or lighten portions of the photograph when transferring it to paper.
    - jrapdx3 1y ago
      Indeed so. Printing on paper and other substrates is inherently subtractive in nature which limits the gamut of colors and values that can be reproduced. Digital methods make the job of translating additive to subtractive media easier vs. the analog techniques available to film photographers. In any case, the image quality classic photography was able to achieve is truly remarkable. Notably, the dodging and burning used by photographers aren't obsolete. There's a reason these tools are included in virtually every image-editing program out there. Manipulating dynamic range, particularly in printed images, remains part of the craft of image-making.
miladyincontrol 1y ago
I do prefer the gain map approach myself. Do a sensible '32 bit' HDR edit, further tweak an SDR version, and export a file that has both. Creative power is still in your hands versus some tone mapper's guesses at your intent. Can people go overboard? Sure, but thats something they will do regardless of any hdr or lack thereof. On an aside its still rough that just about every site that touches gain map (adaptive HDR as this blog calls them) HDR images will lose that metadata if they need to scale, recompress, or transform the images otherwise. Its led me to just make my own site, but also to handle what files a client gets a bit smarter . For instance if a browser doesnt support .jxl or .avif images, im sure it wont want an hdr jpeg either, thats easy to handle on a webserver.
ddingus 1y ago
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.
Uncorrelated 1y ago
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 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unpro-camera/id6535677796
- springhalo 1y ago
  I see that it says it stores images "in an HDR format by default" but keeps referencing JPEG output. Are you using JPEG-XT? There aren't a lot of "before and after" comparisons so it's hard to know how much it's taking out. I figure those would probably hurt the reputation of the app considering its purpose is to un-pop photos, but I'm in the boat of not really being sure whether I do actually like the pop or not. Is there live-photo support, or is that something that you shouldn't expect from a artist-focused product?
  - Uncorrelated 1y ago
    It's a JPEG + gain map format where the gain map is stored in the metadata. Same thing, as far as I can tell, that Halide is now using. It's what the industry is moving towards; it means that images display well on both SDR and HDR displays. I don't know what JPEG-XT is, aside from what I just skimmed on the Wikipedia page. Not having before-and-after comparisons is mostly down to my being concerned about whether that would pass App Review; the guidelines indicate that the App Store images are supposed to be screenshots of the app, and I'm already pushing that rule with the example images for filters. I'm not sure a hubristic "here's how much better my photos are than Apple's" image would go over well. Maybe in my next update? I should at least have some comparisons on my website, but I've been bad at keeping that updated. There's no Live Photo support, though I've been thinking about it. The reason is that my current iPhone 14 Pro Max does not support Live Photos while shooting in 48-megapixel mode; the capture process takes too long. I'd have to come up with a compromise such as only having video up to the moment of capture. That doesn't prevent me from implementing it for other iPhones/cameras/resolutions, but I don't like having features unevenly available.
npteljes 1y ago
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.
caseyy 1y ago
The dad’s photo in the end in SDR looks so much better on a typical desktop IPS panel (Windows 11). The HDR photo looks like the brightness is smushed in the most awful way. On an iPhone, the HDR photo is excellent and the others look muted. I wonder if there’s an issue in Windows tonemapping or HDR->SDR pipeline, because perceptually the HDR image is really off. It’s more off than if I took an SDR picture of my iPhone showing the HDR image and showed that SDR picture on the said Windows machine with an IPS panel. Which tells me that the manual HDR->SDR “pipeline” I just described is better. I think Windows showing HDR content on a non-HDR display should just pick an SDR-sized section of that long dynamic range and show it normally. Without trying to remap the entire large range to a smaller one. Or it should do some other perceptual improvements. Then again, I know professionally that Windows HDR is complicated and hard to tame. So I’m not really sure the context of remapping as they do, maybe it’s the only way in some contingency/rare scenario.
fracus 1y ago
The article starts by saying HDR can mean different things and gives Apple's HDR vs new TV "HDR" advertsing but doesn't explain at all what the TV HDR means and how it is different, unless I missed something. I always assumed they were the same thing.
flkiwi 1y ago
Did I miss something or is the tone mapper not released yet? I admit I'm multitasking here, but just have an exposure slider in the image lab (or whatever it's called). Sidebar: I kinda miss when Halide's driving purpose was rapid launch and simplicity. I would almost prefer a zoom function to all of this HDR gymnastics (though, to be clear, Halide is my most-used and most-liked camera app). EDIT: Ah, I see, it's a Mark III feature. That is not REMOTELY clear in the (very long) post.
Xplan 1y ago
[flagged]
neves 1y ago
Interesting these HDR controls of their app Halide. Does Android have similar apps?
mightysashiman 1y ago
I have a question: how can I print HDR? Is there any HDR printer + paper + display lighting setup? My hypothesis are the following: - Increase display lighting to increase peak white point + use a black ink able to absorb more light (can Vantablack-style pigments be made into ink?) => increase dynamic range of a printable picture - Alternatively, have the display lighting include visible light + invisible UV light, and have the printed picture include an invisible layer of UV ink that shines white : the pattern printed in invisible UV-ink would be the "gain map" to increase the peak brightness past incident visible light into HDR range. What do you folks think?
- redox99 1y ago
  You would need a very strong light surrounded by a darkish environent. I don't see a point in "HDR Paper" if you need to place it under a special light.
  - mightysashiman 1y ago
    usecase: a photo exhibition that wants to show pictures in HDR = An HDR print setup (i.e. paper + appropriately controlled lighting). Haven't you ever been to a photo exhibition ?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- grumbel 1y ago
  Use projection mapping, instead of lighting the photo uniformly, use a projector and project a copy of the image onto the photo, thus you get detailed control over how much light the parts of the image receive. Alternatively, use transparent film and a bright backlight.
labadal 1y ago
Back in university I implemented a shoddy HDR for my phone camera. The hardest part of it, by far, was taking hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of a blank piece of paper in different lighting conditions with different settings.
ByteAtATime 1y ago
In my opinion, HDR is another marketing gimmick -- the average layman has no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy and is more expensive, so surely it's good.
kristianp 1y ago
A related article on dpreview about Sigmas hdr map in jpegs has some tasteful hdr photos. You have to click/tap the photo to see the effect. https://www.dpreview.com/news/7452255382/sigma-brings-hdr-brightness-maps-high-dynamic-range-photography https://www.dpreview.com/news/7452255382/sigma-brings-hdr-br...
chaboud 1y ago
Having come from professional video/film tooling in the 90's to today, it's interesting to see the evolution of what "HDR" means. I used to be a purist in this space, where SDR meant ~8 stops (powers of two) or less of dynamic range, and HDR meant 10+. Color primaries and transfer function mapping were things I spoke specifically about. At this point, though, folks use "HDR" to refer to combinations of things. Around this, a bunch of practical tooling surfaced (e.g., hybrid log approaches to luminance mapping) to extend the thinking from 8-bit gamma-mapped content presenting ~8 stops of dynamic range to where we are now. If we get away from just trying to label everyting "HDR", there are some useful things people should familiarize with: 1. Color primaries: examples - SDR: Rec. 601, Rec. 709, sRGB. HDR: Rec. 2020, DCI-P3. The new color primaries expand the chromatic representation capabilities. This is pretty easy to wrap our heads around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020 2. Transfer functions: examples - SDR: sRGB, BT.1886. HDR: Rec. 2100 Perceptual Quantizer (PQ), HLG. The big thing in this space to care about is that SDR transfer functions had reference peak luminance but were otherwise relative to that peak luminance. By contrast, Rec. 2100 PQ code points are absolute, in that each code value has a defined meaning in measurable luminance, per the PQ EOTF transfer function. This is a big departure from our older SDR universe and from Hybrid Log Gamma approaches. 3. Tone mapping: In SDR, we had the comfort of camera and display technologies roughly lining up in the video space, so living in a gamma/inverse-gamma universe was fine. We just controlled the eccentricity of the curve. Now, with HDR, we have formats that can carry tone-mapping information and transports (e.g., HDMI) that can bidirectionally signal display target capabilities, allowing things like source-based tone mapping. Go digging into HDR10+, Dolby Vision, or HDMI SBTM for a deep rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping So HDR is everything (and nothing), but it's definitely important. If I had to emphasize one thing that is non-obvious to most new entrants into the space, it's that there are elements of description of color and luminance that are absolute in their meaning, rather than relative. That's a substantial shift. Extra points for figuring out that practical adaptation to display targets is built into formats and protocols.
squidsoup 1y ago
As a photographer, one of the things that draws me to the work of artists like Bill Brandt and Daido Moriyama is their use of low dynamic range, and high contrast. I rarely see an HDR image that is aesthetically interesting.
Terr_ 1y ago
> Our eyes can see both just fine. This gets to a gaming rant of mine: Our natural vision can handle these things because our eyes scan sections of the scene with constant adjustment (light-level, focus) while our brain is compositing it together into what feels like a single moment. However certain effects in games (i.e. "HDR" and Depth of Field) instead reduce the fidelity of the experience. These features limp along only while our gaze is aimed at the exact spot the software expects. If you glance anywhere else around the scene, you instead percieve an unrealistically wrong coloration or blur that frustratingly persists no matter how much you squint. These problems will remain until gaze-tracking support becomes standard. So ultimately these features reduce the realism of the experience. They make it less like being there and more like you're watching a second-hand movie recorded on flawed video-cameras. This distinction is even clearer if you consider cases where "film grain" is added.
- glenngillen 1y ago
  I had a similar complaint with the few 3D things I watched when that has been hyped in the past (e.g., when Avatar came out in cinemas, and when 3D home TVs seemed to briefly become a thing 15 years ago). It felt like Hollywood was giving me the freedom to immerse myself, but then simultaneously trying to constrain that freedom and force me to look at specific things in specific ways. I don't know what the specific solution is, but it struck me that we needed to be adopting lessons from live stage productions more than cinema if you really want people to think what they're seeing is real.
  - pfranz 1y ago
    Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a very narrow viewing angle). It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye. Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird. When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium. I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.
Ericson2314 1y ago
Half life 2 lost coast was exciting Glad all this "Instagram influences searing eyeballs with bright whites" is news to me. All I know about is QR code mode doing that.
sn0n 1y ago
Tldr; lots of vivid colors.
hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago
Digital camera technology is so fascinating.
shrx 1y ago
Question to the author: Why are the images in the "Solution 2: Genuine HDR Displays" section actually videos? E.g. <video src="https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-york-skyline-hdr.mp4" poster="https://img.spacergif.org/v1/4032x3024/0a/spacer.png" width="4032" height="3024" loop="" autoplay="" muted="" playsinline="" preload="metadata" style="background: transparent url('https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-york-skyline-hdr_thumb.jpg') 50% 50% / cover no-repeat;"></video>
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Your question is answered in the article. Look for the word video.
  - shrx 1y ago
    Yes but I'm interested in the technical reasons.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Safari doesn't support HDR images and there's no particularly good reason for it.

806 points by _kush 1y ago

esperent 1y ago

This page crashed Brave on Android three times before I gave up.

mcjiggerlog 1y ago
For me this crashed in android webview, android chrome, and android firefox. Impressive.
breytex 1y ago
Same for me. Pixel 8, chrome

4ad 1y ago

HDR is just a scene-referred image using absolute luminance.

the__alchemist 1y ago
Not in the more general sense! It can refer to what its acronym spells out directly: Bigger range between dimmest and brightest capabilities of a display, imaging technique etc.
- 4ad 1y ago
  No. HDR can encode high dynamic range because (typically) it uses floating point encoding. From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-referred images and video, along with a set of standards for reproduction.
  - cornstalks 1y ago
    No. HDR video (and images) don't use floating point encoding. They generally use a higher bit depth (10 bits or more vs 8 bits) to reduce banding and different transfer characteristics (i.e. PQ or HLG vs sRGB or BT.709), in addition to different YCbCr matrices and mastering metadata. And no, it's not necessarily absolute luminance. PQ is absolute, HLG is not.
    - skhameneh 1y ago
      Isn’t HLG using floating point(s)? Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR. I would share more insight, if I had it. I thought I understood color profiles well, but I have encountered some challenges when trying to display in one, edit in another, and print “correctly”. And every device seems to treat color profiles a little bit differently.
      - kllrnohj 1y ago
        > Isn’t HLG using floating point(s)? All transfer functions can generally work on either integer range or floating point. They basically just describe a curve shape, and you can have that curve be over the range of 0.0-1.0 just as easily as you can over 0-255 or 0-1023. Extended sRGB is about the only thing that basically requires floating point, as it specifically describes 0.0-1.0 as being equivalent to sRGB and then has a valid range larger than that (you end up with something like -.8 to 2.4 or greater). And representing that in integer domain is conceptually possible but practically not really. > Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR. BT2020 is the most standardized color space for HDR. DCI-P3 is the most common color gamut of HDR displays that you can actually afford, however, but that's a smaller gamut than what most HDR profiles expect (HDR10, HDR10+, and "professional" DolbyVision are all BT2020 - a wider gamut than P3). Which also means most HDR content specifies a color gamut it doesn't actually benefit from having as all that HDR content is still authored to only use somewhere between the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamut since that's all anyone who views it will actually have.
      - cornstalks 1y ago
        You can read the actual HLG spec here: https://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/doc/2-STD-B67v2_0.pdf https://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/doc/2-STD-B67v2... The math uses real numbers but table 2-4 ("Digital representation") discusses how the signal is quantized to/from analog and digital. The signal is quantized to integers. This same quantization process is done for sRGB, BT.709, BT.2020, etc. so it's not unique to HLG. It's just how digital images/video are stored.
  - dahart 1y ago
    I think most HDR formats do not typically use 32 bit floating point. The first HDR file format I can remember is Greg Ward’s RGBE format, which is also now more commonly known as .HDR and I think is pretty widely used. https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~bjw/rgbe.html It uses a type of floating point, in a way, but it’s a shared 8 bit exponent across all 3 channels, and the channels are still 8 bits each, so the whole thing fits in 32 bits. Even the .txt file description says it’s not “floating point” per-se since that implies IEEE single precision floats. Cameras and displays don’t typically use floats, and even CG people working in HDR and using, e.g., OpenEXR, might use half floats more often that float. Some standards do exist, and it’s improving over time, but the ideas and execution of HDR in various ways preceded any standards, so I think it’s not helpful to define HDR as a set of standards. From my perspective working in CG, HDR began as a way to break away from 8 bits per channel RGB, and it included improving both color range and color resolution, and started the discussion of using physical metrics as opposed to relative [0..1] ranges.
kllrnohj 1y ago
No, it isn't. Absolute luminance is a "feature" of PQ specifically used by HDR10(+) and most DolbyVision content (notably the DolbyVision as produced by an iPhone is not PQ, it's not "real" DolbyVision). But this is not the only form of HDR and it's not even the common form for phone cameras. HLG is a lot more popular for cameras and it is not in absolute luminance. The gainmap-based approach that Google, Apple, and Adobe are all using is also very much not absolute luminance, either. In fact that flips it entirely and it's SDR relative instead, which is a much better approach to HDR than what video initially went with.
pavlov 1y ago
Ideally in the abstract it could be just that, but in practice it's an umbrella name for many different techniques that provide some aspect of that goal.

CarVac 1y ago

HDR on displays is actually largely uncomfortable for me. They should reserve the brightest HDR whites for things like the sun itself and caustics, not white walls in indoor photos. As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.

NBJack 1y ago
HDR is really hard to get right apparently. It seems to get worse in video games too. I'm a huge fan of Helldivers 2, but playing the game in HDR gives me a headache: the muzzle flash of weapons at high RPMs on a screen that goes to 240hz is basically a continuous flashbang for my eyes. For a while, No Mans' Sky in HDR mode was basically the color saturation of every planet dialed up to 11. The only game I've enjoyed at HDR was a port from a console, Returnal. The use of HDR brights was minimalistic and tasteful, often reserved for certain particle effects.
- simoncion 1y ago
  For a year or two after it launched, The Division 2 was a really, really good example of HDR done right. The game had (has?) a day/night cycle, and it had a really good control of the brightness throughout the day. More importantly, it made very good use of the wide color gamut available to it. I stopped playing that game for several years, and when I went back to it, the color and brightness had been wrecked to all hell. I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's part of why they ruined their game's renderer. Some games that I think currently have good HDR: * Lies of P * Hunt: Showdown 1896 * Monster Hunter: World (if you increase the game's color saturation a bit from its default settings) Some games that had decent-to-good HDR the last time I played them, a few years ago: * Battlefield 1 * Battlefield V * Battlefield 2042 (If you're looking for a fun game, I do NOT recommend this one. Also, the previous two are probably chock-full of cheaters these days.) I found Helldivers 2's HDR mode to have blacks that were WAY too bright. In SDR mode, nighttime in forest areas was dark. In HDR mode? It was as if you were standing in the middle of a field during a full moon.
  - 1y ago

the__alchemist 1y ago

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 phone or PC screen. The pic fails to capture what your eyes see for lighting range.

aethrum 1y ago
For gaming, definitely. An HDR Oled monitor is so immersive.
esperent 1y ago
I think it depends on the screen and also what you use it for. My OLED is unusable for normal work in HDR because it's designed around only a small portion of the screen being at max brightness - reasonable for a game or movie, but the result is that a small window with white background will look really bright, but if I maximize it, it'll look washed out, grey not white. Also the maximum brightness isn't even that bright at 800 nits, so no HDR content really looks that different. I think newer OLEDs are brighter though. I'm still happy with the screen in general, even in SDR the OLED really shines. But it made me aware not all HDR screens are equal. Also, in my very short experiment using HDR for daily work I ran into several problems, the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer.
- simoncion 1y ago
  > ...the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer. To be pedantic, this has always been the case... Who the hell knows what bonkers "color enhancement" your recipient has going on on their end? But (more seriously) it's very, very stupid that most systems out there will ignore color profile data embedded in pictures (and many video players ignore the same in videos [0]). It's quite possible to tone-map HDR stuff so it looks reasonable on SDR displays, but color management is like accessibility in that nearly noone who's in charge of paying for software development appears to give any shits about it. [0] A notable exception to this is MPV. I can't recommend this video player highly enough.

gyomu 1y ago

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 the HDR photos I had to turn down my display even more to not strain my eyes, then back up again when I scrolled to the text. For fullscreen content (games, movies) HDR is alright, but for everyday computing it's a pretty jarring experience as a user.

beachwood23 1y ago
Completely agree. To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. I set my screen brightness to a certain level for a reason. Please don’t just arbitrarily turn up the brightness! There is no good way to disable HDR on photos for iPhone, either. Sure, you can turn off the HDR on photos on your iphone. But then, when you cast to a different display, the TV tries to display the photos in HDR, and it won’t look half as good.
- repelsteeltje 1y ago
  > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. You might be on to something there. Technically, HDR is mostly about profile signaling and therefore about interop. To support it in mpeg dash or hls media you need to make sure certain codec attributes are mentioned in the xml or m3u8 but the actual media payload stays the same. Any bit or Bob being misconfigured or misinterpreted in the streaming pipeline will result in problems ranging from slightly suboptimal experience to nothing works. Besides HDR, "spatial audio" formats like Dolby Atmos are notorious for interop isuues
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  > To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings. On both Android & iOS/MacOS it's not that HDR is ignoring your screen brightness, but rather the brightness slider is controlling the SDR range and then yes HDR can exceed that, that's the singular purpose of HDR to be honest. All the other purported benefits of HDR are at best just about HDR video profiles and at worst just nonsense bullshit. The only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter colors vs. SDR. When used selectively this really enhances a scene. But restraint is hard, and most forms of HDR content production are shit. The HDR images that newer iPhones and Pixel phones are capturing are generally quite good because they are actually restrained, but then ironically both of them have horrible HDR video that's just obnoxiously bright.

echo_time 1y ago

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?

viraptor 1y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr there's the tracking issue for HDR support.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Tbh, I'm glad this isn't supported in Firefox as of right now
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mikepurvis 1y ago
Can confirm on Windows 11 with HDR enabled on my display— I see the photos in the article correctly on Chrome and they're a grey mess on Firefox.
- lloeki 1y ago
  On macOS even without HDR enabled on my display there's a striking difference due to better tone mapping between Safari and Firefox. If I enable HDR the Firefox ones become a gray mess vs the lights feeling like actual lights in Safari.
throwaway314155 1y ago
For what it's worth, your comment has me convinced I just "can't see" HDR properly because I have the same page side-by-side on Firefox and Chrome on my M4 MBP and honestly? Can't see the difference. edit: Ah, nevermind. It seems Firefox is doing some sort of post-processing (maybe bad tonemapping?) on-the-fly as the pictures start out similar but degrade to washed out after some time. In particular, the "OVERTHROW BOXING CLUB" photo makes this quite apparent. That's a damn shame Firefox. C'mon, HDR support feels like table stakes at this point. edit2: Apparently it's not table stakes. > Browser support is halfway there. Google beat Apple to the punch with their own version of Adaptive HDR they call Ultra HDR, which Chrome 14 now supports. Safari has added HDR support into its developer preview, then it disabled it, due to bugs within iOS. at which point I would just say to `lux.camera` authors - why not put a big fat warning at the top for users with a Firefox or Safari (stable) browser? With all the emphasis on supposedly simplifying a difficult standard, the article has fallen for one of its most famous pitfalls. "It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people." Yep, and you've made it even worse for a huge chunk of people. :shrug: Great article n' all just saying.

sebstefan 1y ago

For the Halide's updated Image Lab demo about 2/3rd of the way down the page (https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-trimmed.mp4 https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-tr...), you made the demo so tall desktop users can't both see the sky & the controls at the same time A lot of these design flaws are fixed by Firefox's picture in picture option but for some reason, with the way you coded it, the prompt to pop it out as PIP doesn't show up

mxfh 1y ago

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 out my eyes in actual HDR display. It is here, where you, the consumer, are as vulnerable to light in a proper dark environment for movie watching, as when raising the window curtains on a bright summer morning. (That brightness abuse by content is actually discussed here) Dolby Vision and Apple have the lead here as a closed platforms, on the web it's simply not predictably possible yet. Best hope is the efforts of the Color on the Web Community Group from my impression. https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG

lordleft 1y ago
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.
- mort96 1y ago
  When I complain about HDR it's because I've intentionally set the brightness of pure white to a comfortable level, and then suddenly parts of my screen are brighter than that. You fundamentally can't solve that problem with just better tone mapping, can you?
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    You can for some definition of "solve", by tone-mapping all HDR content back down into an SDR range for display.
    - mort96 1y ago
      Well yeah. I considered adding that caveat but elected not to because it's obvious and doesn't add anything to the conversation, since that's obviously not what's meant when the industry talks about "HDR". Should've remembered this is HN.

sergioisidoro 1y ago

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 higher dynamic range in analog photos. About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. I find they are good at capturing family moments, but not as a creative tool.

CarVac 1y ago
I wrote a raw processing app Filmulator that simulates stand development/compensating developers to give such an effect to digital photography. I still use it myself but I need to redo the build system and release it with an updated LibRaw... not looking forward to that.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
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.
CharlesW 1y ago
> About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. HDR is what enables you to capture both the darkest shadow detail and the brightest highlight detail. With SDR, one or both are often simply just lost. It might come down to preference — if you're an "auto" shooter and like the effect of the visual information at the edges of the available dynamic range being truncated, SDR is for you. Some people prefer to capture that detail and have the ability to decide whether and how to diminish or remove it, with commensurately more control over the artistic impact. For those folks, HDR is highly desirable.

dsego 1y ago

Isn't the result of their tone mapping algo similar to adjusting shadow and highlight sliders in other software?

sandofsky 1y ago
No. When you simply adjust shadow and highlights, you lose local contrast. In an early draft of the post, there was an example, but it was cut for pacing.

fogleman 1y ago

So, if cameras have poor dynamic range, how are they getting away with a single exposure? They didn't explain that at all...

sandofsky 1y ago
Human vision has around 20 stops of static dynamic range. Modern digital cameras can't match human vision— a $90,000 Arri Alexa boasts 17 stops— but they're way better than SDR screens.

cainxinth 1y ago

I chuckled at "The Ed Hardy t-shirt of photography" for the early, overdone "HDR-mode" images.

perching_aix 1y ago

I'm not entirely convinced that greedy influencers are to blame for people hating on overly bright content. Instead, I think something is different with how displays produce brightness compared to just the nature outside. Light outside is supposed to reach up to tens of thousands of nits, yet even 1000 nits is searing on a display. Is it that displays output polarized light? Is it the spectral distribution of especially the better displays being three really tight peaks? I cannot tell you, but I'm suspecting something isn't quite right. All this aside, HDR and high brightness are different things - HDR is just a representational thing. You can go full send on your SDR monitor as well, you'll just see more banding. The majority of the article is just content marketing about how they perform automatic tonemapping anyways.

ziml77 1y ago
It's all down to the ambient light. That's why bias lighting is now a thing. Try putting a light behind your screen to massively brighten the wall behind it, the 1000 nit peaks will be far less harsh. And if you bring the device out into sunlight I suspect you will wish for everything about its output to be quite a bit brighter.
layer8 1y ago
> Light outside is supposed to reach up to tens of thousands of nits, yet even 1000 nits is searing on a display. That’s a consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye). If you look at 1000 nits on a display in bright sunlight, with your eyes adapted to the bright surroundings, the display would look rather dim.

therealmarv 1y ago

... something Linux Desktops don't understand and Macs only do well with their own displays with videos. Guess who the winner is on the desktop: Windows oO

dismalaf 1y ago
Linux does HDR. It's *technically" worked for years but none of the big DEs had it working. Now Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 (Gnome) have it working out of the box.
- therealmarv 1y ago
  ha, interesting. thanks!
hombre_fatal 1y ago
HDR on my MacBook means play the youtube video at full brightness no matter how dim I’ve made the screen. It’s infuriating. e.g. Open this in macOS Chrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq7H6PI4JF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq7H6PI4JF8

bookofjoe 1y ago

As a non-techie I represent the 99.9% of the population who haven't a clue what tone mapping etc. is: NO WAY would we ever touch the various settings possible as opposed to watching the TV/computer screen/etc. as it came out of the box.

c-fe 1y ago

i am still skeptical about HDR as pretty much all HDR content I see online is awful. But this post makes me believe that Lux/Halide can pull of HDR in a way that I will like. I am looking forward to Halide Mk3.

alistairSH 1y ago

"The Ed Hardy T-Shirt of Photography" Literal snort.

randall 1y ago

This was super awesome. Thanks for this! Especially the HDR photo reveal felt really awesome.

aidenn0 1y ago

> 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 screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.

dmitshur 1y ago
To demonstrate some contrast (heh) with another data point from someone closer to the other extreme, I’ve owned a very HDR-capable monitor (the Apple Pro Display XDR) since 2020, so that’s 5 years now. Content that takes full advantage of it is still rare, but it’s getting better slowly over time.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  I have a screen which is "HDR" but what that means is when you turn the feature on it just makes everything more muted, it doesn't actually have any more dynamic range. When you turn HDR on for a game it basically just makes most things more muddy grey. I also have a screen which has a huge gamut and blows out colors in a really nice way (a bit like the aftereffects of hallucinogens, it has colors other screens just don't) and you don't have to touch any settings. My OLED TV has HDR and it actually seems like HDR content makes a difference while regular content is still "correct".
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    The cheap displays adding broken HDR400 support destroyed so much public opinion on HDR. Not actually providing a wider range but accepting the HDR signal would at least have been a minor improvement if the tone mapping weren't completely broken to the point most people just associate HDR with a washed out picture.
    - 1y ago

tomatotomato37 1y ago

If anyone was hoping for a more technical explanation, I find these pages do a good job explaining the inner workings behind the format https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth.... https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_space_size.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac... https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_linear_painting.html https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...

asafira 1y ago

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY_hJ8FVpJ4fEFDe4XC9SDFW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).

brcmthrowaway 1y ago
Pixel camera hardware or software? Isnt there only one vendor for sensors - Sony?
- dawidpotocki 1y ago
  Samsung also makes sensors for phones. IIRC some Pixels use their sensors.
  - xattt 1y ago
    Is Sony the ASML of the sensor world?
    - brcmthrowaway 1y ago
      Definitely
  - hypercube33 1y ago
    I think Canon makes at least some of their sensors, and Nikon designs theirs and makes it at a third party I forget the name of that isn't Sony or Samsung but they still do use Sony stuff in a lot of their cameras. I don't know about Pentax, Panasonic or OMD (formerly Olympus)

hatsunearu 1y ago

Is there any workflow that can output HDR photos (like the real HDR kind, with metadata to tell the display to go into HDR mode) for photos shot with a mirrorless and not an iPhone?

Uncorrelated 1y ago
Yes. For example, Lightroom and Camera Raw support HDR editing and export from RAW images, and Adobe published a good rundown on the feature when they introduced it. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/hdr-explained Greg Benz Photography maintains a list of software here: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/ https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-display-photo-software/ I'm not sure what FOSS options there are; it's difficult to search for given that "HDR" can mean three or four different things in common usage.

gwbas1c 1y ago

> AI cannot read your mind, so it cannot honor your intent. This. I can always tell when someone "gets" software development when they either understand (or don't) that computers can't read minds or infer intent like a person can.

NelsonMinar 1y ago

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?

lloeki 1y ago
Yes, and not just static but dynamic properties: https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/ https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/
adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
this isn't a correct definition. human perception of brightness is roughly logarithmic, so it also matters how deep the blacks get. For a good HDR experience, you need a monitor that gets to 600 nits at a bare minimum, but also which can get very close to 0 nits (e.g. via OLED or less optionally local dimming)

deleted 1y ago

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caseyy 1y ago

HDR is when you’re watching a dark film at night, looking at the subtle nuances between shades of dark and black in the shadows on the screen, making out the faint contours the film director carefully curated, and the subtitles gently deposit 40W of light into your optical nerves with “♪”.

shrx 1y ago
I actually kind of hate the fact that the subtitles on my (SDR) OLED display never get as bright as some parts of the video itself.

dahart 1y ago

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 lose color resolution in super dark color. As a photographer, with HDR you can re-expose the image when you display/print it, where previously that wasn’t possible. Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing HDR gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom, allowing them to adjust exposure after the fact. Ansel Adams wasn’t using HDR in the same sense we’re talking about, he was just really good at capturing the right exposure for his medium without needing to adjust it later. There is a very valid argument to be made for doing the work up-front to capture what you’re after, but ignoring that for a moment, it is simply not possible to re-expose Adams’ negatives to reveal color detail he didn’t capture. That’s why he’s not using HDR, and why saying he is will only further muddy the water.

QuantumGood 1y ago
Adams adjusted heavily with dodging and burning, even working to invent a new chemical process to provide more control when developing. He was great at determining exposure for his process as well. A key skill was having a vision for what the image would be after adjusting. Adams talked a lot about this as a top priority of his process.
- Demiurge 1y ago
  > It's even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens! I came here to point this out. You have a pretty high dynamic range in the captured medium, and then you can use the tools you have to darken or lighten portions of the photograph when transferring it to paper.
  - jrapdx3 1y ago
    Indeed so. Printing on paper and other substrates is inherently subtractive in nature which limits the gamut of colors and values that can be reproduced. Digital methods make the job of translating additive to subtractive media easier vs. the analog techniques available to film photographers. In any case, the image quality classic photography was able to achieve is truly remarkable. Notably, the dodging and burning used by photographers aren't obsolete. There's a reason these tools are included in virtually every image-editing program out there. Manipulating dynamic range, particularly in printed images, remains part of the craft of image-making.

miladyincontrol 1y ago

I do prefer the gain map approach myself. Do a sensible '32 bit' HDR edit, further tweak an SDR version, and export a file that has both. Creative power is still in your hands versus some tone mapper's guesses at your intent. Can people go overboard? Sure, but thats something they will do regardless of any hdr or lack thereof. On an aside its still rough that just about every site that touches gain map (adaptive HDR as this blog calls them) HDR images will lose that metadata if they need to scale, recompress, or transform the images otherwise. Its led me to just make my own site, but also to handle what files a client gets a bit smarter . For instance if a browser doesnt support .jxl or .avif images, im sure it wont want an hdr jpeg either, thats easy to handle on a webserver.

ddingus 1y ago

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.

Uncorrelated 1y ago

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 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unpro-camera/id6535677796

springhalo 1y ago
I see that it says it stores images "in an HDR format by default" but keeps referencing JPEG output. Are you using JPEG-XT? There aren't a lot of "before and after" comparisons so it's hard to know how much it's taking out. I figure those would probably hurt the reputation of the app considering its purpose is to un-pop photos, but I'm in the boat of not really being sure whether I do actually like the pop or not. Is there live-photo support, or is that something that you shouldn't expect from a artist-focused product?
- Uncorrelated 1y ago
  It's a JPEG + gain map format where the gain map is stored in the metadata. Same thing, as far as I can tell, that Halide is now using. It's what the industry is moving towards; it means that images display well on both SDR and HDR displays. I don't know what JPEG-XT is, aside from what I just skimmed on the Wikipedia page. Not having before-and-after comparisons is mostly down to my being concerned about whether that would pass App Review; the guidelines indicate that the App Store images are supposed to be screenshots of the app, and I'm already pushing that rule with the example images for filters. I'm not sure a hubristic "here's how much better my photos are than Apple's" image would go over well. Maybe in my next update? I should at least have some comparisons on my website, but I've been bad at keeping that updated. There's no Live Photo support, though I've been thinking about it. The reason is that my current iPhone 14 Pro Max does not support Live Photos while shooting in 48-megapixel mode; the capture process takes too long. I'd have to come up with a compromise such as only having video up to the moment of capture. That doesn't prevent me from implementing it for other iPhones/cameras/resolutions, but I don't like having features unevenly available.

npteljes 1y ago

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.

caseyy 1y ago

The dad’s photo in the end in SDR looks so much better on a typical desktop IPS panel (Windows 11). The HDR photo looks like the brightness is smushed in the most awful way. On an iPhone, the HDR photo is excellent and the others look muted. I wonder if there’s an issue in Windows tonemapping or HDR->SDR pipeline, because perceptually the HDR image is really off. It’s more off than if I took an SDR picture of my iPhone showing the HDR image and showed that SDR picture on the said Windows machine with an IPS panel. Which tells me that the manual HDR->SDR “pipeline” I just described is better. I think Windows showing HDR content on a non-HDR display should just pick an SDR-sized section of that long dynamic range and show it normally. Without trying to remap the entire large range to a smaller one. Or it should do some other perceptual improvements. Then again, I know professionally that Windows HDR is complicated and hard to tame. So I’m not really sure the context of remapping as they do, maybe it’s the only way in some contingency/rare scenario.

fracus 1y ago

The article starts by saying HDR can mean different things and gives Apple's HDR vs new TV "HDR" advertsing but doesn't explain at all what the TV HDR means and how it is different, unless I missed something. I always assumed they were the same thing.

flkiwi 1y ago

Did I miss something or is the tone mapper not released yet? I admit I'm multitasking here, but just have an exposure slider in the image lab (or whatever it's called). Sidebar: I kinda miss when Halide's driving purpose was rapid launch and simplicity. I would almost prefer a zoom function to all of this HDR gymnastics (though, to be clear, Halide is my most-used and most-liked camera app). EDIT: Ah, I see, it's a Mark III feature. That is not REMOTELY clear in the (very long) post.

Xplan 1y ago

[flagged]

neves 1y ago

Interesting these HDR controls of their app Halide. Does Android have similar apps?

mightysashiman 1y ago

I have a question: how can I print HDR? Is there any HDR printer + paper + display lighting setup? My hypothesis are the following: - Increase display lighting to increase peak white point + use a black ink able to absorb more light (can Vantablack-style pigments be made into ink?) => increase dynamic range of a printable picture - Alternatively, have the display lighting include visible light + invisible UV light, and have the printed picture include an invisible layer of UV ink that shines white : the pattern printed in invisible UV-ink would be the "gain map" to increase the peak brightness past incident visible light into HDR range. What do you folks think?

redox99 1y ago
You would need a very strong light surrounded by a darkish environent. I don't see a point in "HDR Paper" if you need to place it under a special light.
- mightysashiman 1y ago
  usecase: a photo exhibition that wants to show pictures in HDR = An HDR print setup (i.e. paper + appropriately controlled lighting). Haven't you ever been to a photo exhibition ?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
grumbel 1y ago
Use projection mapping, instead of lighting the photo uniformly, use a projector and project a copy of the image onto the photo, thus you get detailed control over how much light the parts of the image receive. Alternatively, use transparent film and a bright backlight.

labadal 1y ago

Back in university I implemented a shoddy HDR for my phone camera. The hardest part of it, by far, was taking hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of a blank piece of paper in different lighting conditions with different settings.

ByteAtATime 1y ago

In my opinion, HDR is another marketing gimmick -- the average layman has no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy and is more expensive, so surely it's good.

kristianp 1y ago

A related article on dpreview about Sigmas hdr map in jpegs has some tasteful hdr photos. You have to click/tap the photo to see the effect. https://www.dpreview.com/news/7452255382/sigma-brings-hdr-brightness-maps-high-dynamic-range-photography https://www.dpreview.com/news/7452255382/sigma-brings-hdr-br...

chaboud 1y ago

Having come from professional video/film tooling in the 90's to today, it's interesting to see the evolution of what "HDR" means. I used to be a purist in this space, where SDR meant ~8 stops (powers of two) or less of dynamic range, and HDR meant 10+. Color primaries and transfer function mapping were things I spoke specifically about. At this point, though, folks use "HDR" to refer to combinations of things. Around this, a bunch of practical tooling surfaced (e.g., hybrid log approaches to luminance mapping) to extend the thinking from 8-bit gamma-mapped content presenting ~8 stops of dynamic range to where we are now. If we get away from just trying to label everyting "HDR", there are some useful things people should familiarize with: 1. Color primaries: examples - SDR: Rec. 601, Rec. 709, sRGB. HDR: Rec. 2020, DCI-P3. The new color primaries expand the chromatic representation capabilities. This is pretty easy to wrap our heads around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020 2. Transfer functions: examples - SDR: sRGB, BT.1886. HDR: Rec. 2100 Perceptual Quantizer (PQ), HLG. The big thing in this space to care about is that SDR transfer functions had reference peak luminance but were otherwise relative to that peak luminance. By contrast, Rec. 2100 PQ code points are absolute, in that each code value has a defined meaning in measurable luminance, per the PQ EOTF transfer function. This is a big departure from our older SDR universe and from Hybrid Log Gamma approaches. 3. Tone mapping: In SDR, we had the comfort of camera and display technologies roughly lining up in the video space, so living in a gamma/inverse-gamma universe was fine. We just controlled the eccentricity of the curve. Now, with HDR, we have formats that can carry tone-mapping information and transports (e.g., HDMI) that can bidirectionally signal display target capabilities, allowing things like source-based tone mapping. Go digging into HDR10+, Dolby Vision, or HDMI SBTM for a deep rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping So HDR is everything (and nothing), but it's definitely important. If I had to emphasize one thing that is non-obvious to most new entrants into the space, it's that there are elements of description of color and luminance that are absolute in their meaning, rather than relative. That's a substantial shift. Extra points for figuring out that practical adaptation to display targets is built into formats and protocols.

squidsoup 1y ago

As a photographer, one of the things that draws me to the work of artists like Bill Brandt and Daido Moriyama is their use of low dynamic range, and high contrast. I rarely see an HDR image that is aesthetically interesting.

Terr_ 1y ago

> Our eyes can see both just fine. This gets to a gaming rant of mine: Our natural vision can handle these things because our eyes scan sections of the scene with constant adjustment (light-level, focus) while our brain is compositing it together into what feels like a single moment. However certain effects in games (i.e. "HDR" and Depth of Field) instead reduce the fidelity of the experience. These features limp along only while our gaze is aimed at the exact spot the software expects. If you glance anywhere else around the scene, you instead percieve an unrealistically wrong coloration or blur that frustratingly persists no matter how much you squint. These problems will remain until gaze-tracking support becomes standard. So ultimately these features reduce the realism of the experience. They make it less like being there and more like you're watching a second-hand movie recorded on flawed video-cameras. This distinction is even clearer if you consider cases where "film grain" is added.

glenngillen 1y ago
I had a similar complaint with the few 3D things I watched when that has been hyped in the past (e.g., when Avatar came out in cinemas, and when 3D home TVs seemed to briefly become a thing 15 years ago). It felt like Hollywood was giving me the freedom to immerse myself, but then simultaneously trying to constrain that freedom and force me to look at specific things in specific ways. I don't know what the specific solution is, but it struck me that we needed to be adopting lessons from live stage productions more than cinema if you really want people to think what they're seeing is real.
- pfranz 1y ago
  Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a very narrow viewing angle). It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye. Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird. When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium. I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.

Ericson2314 1y ago

Half life 2 lost coast was exciting Glad all this "Instagram influences searing eyeballs with bright whites" is news to me. All I know about is QR code mode doing that.

sn0n 1y ago

Tldr; lots of vivid colors.

hfgjbcgjbvg 1y ago

Digital camera technology is so fascinating.

shrx 1y ago

Question to the author: Why are the images in the "Solution 2: Genuine HDR Displays" section actually videos? E.g. <video src="https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-york-skyline-hdr.mp4" poster="https://img.spacergif.org/v1/4032x3024/0a/spacer.png" width="4032" height="3024" loop="" autoplay="" muted="" playsinline="" preload="metadata" style="background: transparent url('https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/03/new-york-skyline-hdr_thumb.jpg') 50% 50% / cover no-repeat;"></video>

Dylan16807 1y ago
Your question is answered in the article. Look for the word video.
- shrx 1y ago
  Yes but I'm interested in the technical reasons.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Safari doesn't support HDR images and there's no particularly good reason for it.