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What is HDR, anyway?

(www.lux.camera)
790 points _kush | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mxfh ◴[] No.43984652[source]
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

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Diti ◴[] No.43985074[source]
They also make no mention of transfer functions, which is the main mechanism which explains why the images “burn your eyes” – content creators should use HLG (which has relative luminance) and not PQ (which has absolute luminance) when they create HDR content for the web.
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1. sandofsky ◴[] No.43987383[source]
In theory PQ specifies absolute values, but in practice it's treated as relative. Go load some PQ encoded content on an iPhone, adjust your screen brightness, and watch the HDR brightness also change. Beyond the iPhone, it would be ridiculous to render absolute values as-is, given SDR white is supposedly 100-nits; that would be unwatchable in most living rooms.

Bad HDR boils down to poor taste and the failure of platforms to rein it in. You can't fix bad HDR by switching encodings any more than you can fix global warming by switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius.