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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 maki

by 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.
  - agos 1y ago
    you are right but at least in my experience it's very easy for a modern iPhone to capture a bad HDR photo, usually because there is some small strong highlight (often a form of specular reflection from a metallic object) that causes everything to be HDR while the photo content wouldn't need it
    - altairprime 1y ago
      In beta testing this morning, the Halide “HDR slider” works as intended to solve that. Some of my photos have only needed +0.3 while a couple taken in near-total no-light-pollution darkness have it cranked all the way to max and that still isn’t enough.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    "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" Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness setting? Looking at the Mac color profiles, the default HDR has some fixed max brightness regardless of the brightness slider. And it's very bright, 1600 nits vs the SDR max of 600 nits. At least I was able to pick another option capping HDR to 600, but that still allows HDR video to force my screen to its normal full brightness even if I dimmed it.
    - kllrnohj 1y ago
      > Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness setting? Not exactly because it is still being scaled by your brightness setting. As in, start playing an HDR video and then mess with the brightness slider. You will still see the HDR content getting dimmer/brighter. It's easier to think about in Apple's EDR terms. 0.0-1.0 is the SDR range, and the brightness slider is changing what the nit value is of "1.0" - is it 100 nits? 300 nits? 50 nits? etc... HDR content (in theory) still has that same 0.0-1.0 portion of the range, and it's still being scaled. However it can exceed that 1.0. It's still being scaled, it's still "respecting" that slider. Just the slider wasn't a brightness limit as you're wanting it to be, but a 1.0 alignment point. The problem comes when HDR content is disrespectful to that. When it just absolutely slams the brightness, pushing all of its content way past that 1.0 value. This is bad content, and unfortunately it's incredibly common in HDR media due in part to the fact that the original HDR specs are very incomplete and in part because it's a new loudness war.
sandofsky 1y ago
While it isn't touched on in the post, I think the issue with feeds is that platforms like Instagram have no interest in moderating HDR. For context: YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold. I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log luminance or some other reasonable metric. I don't see this happening on Instagram any time soon, because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up. As for the HDR photos in the post, well, those are a bit strong to show what HDR can do. That's why the Mark III beta includes a much tamer HDR grade.
- corndoge 1y ago
  The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in the article
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - nightpool 1y ago
    You are replying to the article's author.
- dheera 1y ago
  > because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up Another related parallel trend recently is that bad AI images get very high view and like counts, so much so that I've lost a lot of motivation for doing real photography because the platforms cease to show them to anyone, even my own followers.
- SquareWheel 1y ago
  FYI: You wrote Chrome 14 in the post, but I believe you meant Android 14.
  - sandofsky 1y ago
    Thanks. Updated.
- 1y ago
hypeatei 1y ago
This happens on Snapchat too with HDR videos. Brightness increases while everything else dims... including the buttons.
skhameneh 1y ago
I’m under the impression this is caused by the use of “HDR mode”(s) and poor adaptive brightness implementations on devices. Displays such as the iPad Pro w/ OLED are phenomenal and don’t seem to implement an overactive adaptive brightness. HDR content has more depth without causing brightness distortion. In contrast, my TV will change brightness modes to display HDR content and disables some of the brightness adjustments when displaying HDR content. It can be very uncomfortably bright in a dark room while being excessively dim in a bright room. It requires adjusting settings to a middle ground resulting in a mixed/mediocre experience overall. My wife’s laptop is the worst of all our devices, while reviews seem to praise the display, it has an overreactive adaptive brightness that cannot be disabled (along with decent G2G response but awful B2W/W2B response that causes ghosting).
- altairprime 1y ago
  Apple’s method involves a good deal of what they call “EDR”, wherein the display gamma is ramped down in concert with ramping the brightness up, so that the brighter areas get brighter while the non-bright areas remain dark due to gamma math; that term is helpful for searching their WWDC developer videos for more details.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    It still looks like how they say where its way too bright and makes formerly “bright” whites appear even neutral grey surrounding the hdr content. Personally I find it extremely jarring when it is just a frame that is hdr within the overall screen. It is much nicer when the hdr content is full screen. Imo I wish I could just disable partial screen hdr and keep the full screen implementation because it is that distracting.
    - altairprime 1y ago
      Out curiosity — I don’t have Instagram to test and this is a perceptual question anyways — if you enable iOS Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce White Point (25%) and increase the screen brightness slightly to compensate for the slight dimness; does that reduce or eliminate the ‘jarring’ness?
dmos62 1y ago
That's not inherent to HDR though. BFV (unless I'm confusing it with something else) has a HDR adjustment routine where you push a slider until the HDR white and the SDR white are identical. Same could be done for desktop environments. In my experience, HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. You can't even play Dolby Vision on Windows, which is the only widely-used HDR format with dynamic metadata.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. I think it's because no one wants it.
  - altairprime 1y ago
    No; Windows 10 barely supports it, and of my hundreds of Steam games, exactly none have any code making use of it; seemingly only AAA mega-budget games have the pipeline bandwidth, but e.g. Dune Imperium and Spaceways have no reason to use it and so don’t bother. Windows 11 focused on improving wide color support which is much more critical, as any game shipping for Mac/Win already has dealt with that aspect of the pipeline and has drabified their game for the pre-Win11 ICC nightmares. Even games like Elite Dangerous, which would be a top candidate for both HDR and wide color, don’t handle this yet; their pipeline is years old and I don’t envy them the work of trying to update it, given how they’re overlaying the in-game UI in the midst of their pipeline. (It doesn’t help that Windows only allows HDR to be defined in EDID and monitor INF files, and that PC monitors start shutting off calibration features when HDR is enabled because their chipsets can’t keep up — just as most modern Sony televisions can’t do both Dolby Vision and VRR because that requires too much processing power for their design budget.)
    - Suppafly 1y ago
      Nothing you're written disproves that no one wants it, if anything the fact that nothing really supports it implies that it's not a valuable feature that people are clamoring for.
zamadatix 1y ago
On the browser spec side this is just starting to get implemented as a CSS property https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_dynamic-range-limit https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_dynamic-range-limit so I expect it might start to be a more common thing in web tech based feeds given time.
casey2 1y ago
This seems more like a "your feeds" problem than an HDR problem. Much in the same way people screencap and convert images willy nilly. I suggest blocking non HDR content
JKCalhoun 1y ago
I experience the same thing you do — but my take on it is different. Being hit with HDR images (and videos on YouTube), while unsettling, makes me then realize how just damned dull the SDR world I had been forced to succumb to has been. Let the whole experience be HDR and perhaps it won't be jarring.

by gyomu 1y ago

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.
- agos 1y ago
  you are right but at least in my experience it's very easy for a modern iPhone to capture a bad HDR photo, usually because there is some small strong highlight (often a form of specular reflection from a metallic object) that causes everything to be HDR while the photo content wouldn't need it
  - altairprime 1y ago
    In beta testing this morning, the Halide “HDR slider” works as intended to solve that. Some of my photos have only needed +0.3 while a couple taken in near-total no-light-pollution darkness have it cranked all the way to max and that still isn’t enough.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  "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" Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness setting? Looking at the Mac color profiles, the default HDR has some fixed max brightness regardless of the brightness slider. And it's very bright, 1600 nits vs the SDR max of 600 nits. At least I was able to pick another option capping HDR to 600, but that still allows HDR video to force my screen to its normal full brightness even if I dimmed it.
  - kllrnohj 1y ago
    > Doesn't this mean HDR is ignoring my brightness setting? Not exactly because it is still being scaled by your brightness setting. As in, start playing an HDR video and then mess with the brightness slider. You will still see the HDR content getting dimmer/brighter. It's easier to think about in Apple's EDR terms. 0.0-1.0 is the SDR range, and the brightness slider is changing what the nit value is of "1.0" - is it 100 nits? 300 nits? 50 nits? etc... HDR content (in theory) still has that same 0.0-1.0 portion of the range, and it's still being scaled. However it can exceed that 1.0. It's still being scaled, it's still "respecting" that slider. Just the slider wasn't a brightness limit as you're wanting it to be, but a 1.0 alignment point. The problem comes when HDR content is disrespectful to that. When it just absolutely slams the brightness, pushing all of its content way past that 1.0 value. This is bad content, and unfortunately it's incredibly common in HDR media due in part to the fact that the original HDR specs are very incomplete and in part because it's a new loudness war.

sandofsky 1y ago

While it isn't touched on in the post, I think the issue with feeds is that platforms like Instagram have no interest in moderating HDR. For context: YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold. I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log luminance or some other reasonable metric. I don't see this happening on Instagram any time soon, because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up. As for the HDR photos in the post, well, those are a bit strong to show what HDR can do. That's why the Mark III beta includes a much tamer HDR grade.

corndoge 1y ago
The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in the article
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nightpool 1y ago
  You are replying to the article's author.
dheera 1y ago
> because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up Another related parallel trend recently is that bad AI images get very high view and like counts, so much so that I've lost a lot of motivation for doing real photography because the platforms cease to show them to anyone, even my own followers.
SquareWheel 1y ago
FYI: You wrote Chrome 14 in the post, but I believe you meant Android 14.
- sandofsky 1y ago
  Thanks. Updated.
1y ago

hypeatei 1y ago

This happens on Snapchat too with HDR videos. Brightness increases while everything else dims... including the buttons.

skhameneh 1y ago

I’m under the impression this is caused by the use of “HDR mode”(s) and poor adaptive brightness implementations on devices. Displays such as the iPad Pro w/ OLED are phenomenal and don’t seem to implement an overactive adaptive brightness. HDR content has more depth without causing brightness distortion. In contrast, my TV will change brightness modes to display HDR content and disables some of the brightness adjustments when displaying HDR content. It can be very uncomfortably bright in a dark room while being excessively dim in a bright room. It requires adjusting settings to a middle ground resulting in a mixed/mediocre experience overall. My wife’s laptop is the worst of all our devices, while reviews seem to praise the display, it has an overreactive adaptive brightness that cannot be disabled (along with decent G2G response but awful B2W/W2B response that causes ghosting).

altairprime 1y ago
Apple’s method involves a good deal of what they call “EDR”, wherein the display gamma is ramped down in concert with ramping the brightness up, so that the brighter areas get brighter while the non-bright areas remain dark due to gamma math; that term is helpful for searching their WWDC developer videos for more details.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  It still looks like how they say where its way too bright and makes formerly “bright” whites appear even neutral grey surrounding the hdr content. Personally I find it extremely jarring when it is just a frame that is hdr within the overall screen. It is much nicer when the hdr content is full screen. Imo I wish I could just disable partial screen hdr and keep the full screen implementation because it is that distracting.
  - altairprime 1y ago
    Out curiosity — I don’t have Instagram to test and this is a perceptual question anyways — if you enable iOS Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce White Point (25%) and increase the screen brightness slightly to compensate for the slight dimness; does that reduce or eliminate the ‘jarring’ness?

dmos62 1y ago

That's not inherent to HDR though. BFV (unless I'm confusing it with something else) has a HDR adjustment routine where you push a slider until the HDR white and the SDR white are identical. Same could be done for desktop environments. In my experience, HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. You can't even play Dolby Vision on Windows, which is the only widely-used HDR format with dynamic metadata.

Suppafly 1y ago
>HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm. I think it's because no one wants it.
- altairprime 1y ago
  No; Windows 10 barely supports it, and of my hundreds of Steam games, exactly none have any code making use of it; seemingly only AAA mega-budget games have the pipeline bandwidth, but e.g. Dune Imperium and Spaceways have no reason to use it and so don’t bother. Windows 11 focused on improving wide color support which is much more critical, as any game shipping for Mac/Win already has dealt with that aspect of the pipeline and has drabified their game for the pre-Win11 ICC nightmares. Even games like Elite Dangerous, which would be a top candidate for both HDR and wide color, don’t handle this yet; their pipeline is years old and I don’t envy them the work of trying to update it, given how they’re overlaying the in-game UI in the midst of their pipeline. (It doesn’t help that Windows only allows HDR to be defined in EDID and monitor INF files, and that PC monitors start shutting off calibration features when HDR is enabled because their chipsets can’t keep up — just as most modern Sony televisions can’t do both Dolby Vision and VRR because that requires too much processing power for their design budget.)
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    Nothing you're written disproves that no one wants it, if anything the fact that nothing really supports it implies that it's not a valuable feature that people are clamoring for.

zamadatix 1y ago

On the browser spec side this is just starting to get implemented as a CSS property https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_dynamic-range-limit https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_dynamic-range-limit so I expect it might start to be a more common thing in web tech based feeds given time.

casey2 1y ago

This seems more like a "your feeds" problem than an HDR problem. Much in the same way people screencap and convert images willy nilly. I suggest blocking non HDR content

JKCalhoun 1y ago

I experience the same thing you do — but my take on it is different. Being hit with HDR images (and videos on YouTube), while unsettling, makes me then realize how just damned dull the SDR world I had been forced to succumb to has been. Let the whole experience be HDR and perhaps it won't be jarring.