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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

• 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.
  • staticautomatic 1y ago
    Contact printing on azo certainly helped!
• albumen 1y ago
  But the article even shows Adams dodging/burning a print, which is 'adjusting the exposure' in a localised fashion of the high dynamic range of the film, effectively revealing detail for the LDR of the resulting print that otherwise wouldn't have been visible.
• arghwhat 1y ago
  Arguably, even considering HDR a distinct thing is itself weird an inaccurate. All mediums have a range, and they've never all matched. Sometimes we've tried to calibrate things to match, but anyone watching SDR content for the past many years probably didn't do so on a color-calibrated and brightness calibrated screen - that wouldn't allow you to have a brightness slider. HDR on monitors is about communicating content brightness and monitor capabilities, but then you have the question of whether to clip the highlights or just map the range when the content is mastered for 4000 nits but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window.
  • dahart 1y ago
    This! Yes I think you’re absolutely right. The term “HDR” is in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time when the most popular image formats and most common displays were not very sophisticated about colors. That said, there is one important part that is often lost. One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture absolute values in physical units, rather than relative brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and paper and TVs don’t have. Some new displays are getting absolute brightness features, but historically most media display relative color values.
    • arghwhat 1y ago
      Absolute is also a funny size. From the perspective of human visual perception, an absolute brightness only matters if the entire viewing environment is also controlled to the same absolute values. Visual perception is highly contextual, and we are not only seeing the screen. It's not fun being unable to watch dark scenes during the day or evening in a living room, nor is vaporizing your retinas if the ambient environment went dark in the meantime. People want good viewing experience in the available environment that is logically similar to what the content intended, but that is not always the same as reproducing the exact same photons as the directors's mastering monitor sent towards their their eyeballs at the time of production.
      • dahart 1y ago
• munificent 1y ago
  > The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion That isn't what the article claims. It says: "Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers of the 20th century, was a master at capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes." "Use HDR" (your term) is vague to the point of not meaning much of anything, but the article is clear that Adams was capturing scenes that had a high dynamic range, which is objectively true.
  • dahart 1y ago
    Literally the sentence preceding the one you quoted is “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?”.
    • zymhan 1y ago
      And that quote specifically does not "lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together". It is directly addressing capture.
      • dahart 1y ago
        Correct. I didn’t say that sentence was the source of the conflation, I said it was the source of the Ansel Adams problem. There are other parts that mix together capture, formats, and display. Edit: and btw I am objecting to calling film capture “HDR”, I don’t think that helps define HDR nor reflects accurately on the history of the term.
        • pavlov 1y ago
          That’s a strange claim because the first digital HDR capture devices were film scanners (for example the Cineon equipment used by the motion picture industry in the 1990s). Film provided a higher dynamic range than digital sensors, and professionals wanted to capture that for image editing. Sure, it wasn’t terribly deep HDR by today’s standards. Cineon used 10 bits per channel with the white point at coding value 685 (and a log color space). That’s still a lot more range and superwhite latitude than you got with standard 8-bpc YUV video.
• xeonmc 1y ago
  > It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together Reminded me of the classic "HDR in games vs HDR in photography" comparison[0] [0] https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/ https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
• deleted 1y ago
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• levidos 1y ago
  Is there a difference in capturing in HDR vs RAW?
  • dahart 1y ago
    Good question. I think it depends. They are kind of different concepts, but in practice they can overlap considerably. RAW is about using the camera’s full native color resolution, and not having lossy compression. HDR is overloaded, as you can see from the article & comments, but I think HDR capture is conceptually about expressing brightness in physical units like luminance or radiance, and delaying the ‘exposure’ until display time. Both RAW and HDR typically mean using more than 8 bits/channel and capturing high quality images that will withstand more post-processing than ‘exposed’ LDR images can handle.
• sandofsky 1y ago
  > It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together, these are very different things. These are all related things. When you talk about color, you can be talking about color cameras, color image formats, and color screens, but the concept of color transcends the implementation. > The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion, and isn’t particularly accurate. The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words, "capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes." > 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. This is just factually wrong. Film negatives have 12-stops of useful dynamic range, while photo paper has 8 stops at best. That gave photographers exposure latitude during the print process. > 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's a photo of Ansel Adams in the article, dodging and burning a print. How would you describe that if not adjusting the exposure?
  • dahart 1y ago
    I agree capture, format and display are closely related. But HDR capture and processing specifically developed outside of HDR display devices, and use of HDR displays changes how HDR images are used compared to LDR displays. > The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words Hey I’m sorry for criticizing, but I honestly feel like you’re being slightly misleading here. The sentence “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?” is explicitly claiming that analog photographers use “HDR” capture, and the Ansel Adams sentence that follows appears to be merely a specific example of your claim. The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact claim Adams used HDR, even if you didn’t quite intend to. I think you’re either misunderstanding me a little, or maybe unaware of some of the context of HDR and its development as a term of art in the computer graphics community. Film’s 12 stops is not really “high” range by HDR standards, and a little exposure latitude isn’t where “HDR” came from. The more important part of HDR was the intent to push toward absolute physical units like luminance. That doesn’t just enable deferred exposure, it enables physical and perceptual processing in ways that aren’t possible with film. It enables calibrated integration with CG simulation that isn’t possible with film. And it enables a much wider rage of exposure push/pull than you can do when going from 12 stops to 8. And of course non-destructive digital deferred exposure at display time is quite different from a print exposure. Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a counterpart called LDR that’s referring to 8 bits/channel RGB. With analog photography, there is no LDR, thus zero reason to invent the notion of a ‘higher’ range. Higher than what? High relative to what? Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want. There is no ‘high’ range in analog photos, there’s just range. HDR was invented to push against and evolve beyond the de-facto digital practices of the 70s-90s, it is not a statement about what range can be captured by a camera.
• Sharlin 1y ago
  No, Adams, like everyone who develops their own film (or RAW digital photos) definitely worked in HDR. Film has much more DR than photographic paper, as noted by TFA author (and large digital sensors more than either SDR or HDR displays) especially if you’re such a master of exposure as Adams; trying to preserve the tonalities when developing and printing your photos is the real big issue.
• pixelfarmer 1y ago
  If I look at one of the photography books in my shelf, they are even talking about 18 stops and such for some film material, and how this doesn't translate to paper and all the things that can be done to render it visible in print and how things behave at both extreme ends (towards black and white). Read: Tone-mapping (i.e. trimming down a high DR image to a lower DR output media) is really old. The good thing about digital is that it can deal with color at decent tonal resolutions (if we assume 16 bits, not the limited 14 bit or even less) and in environments where film has technical limitations.