What is HDR, anyway?

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

> Does anyone else find the hubris in the first paragraph writing as off-putting as I do? > "we finally explain what HDR actually means"

No. Because it's written for the many casual photographers we've spoken with who are confused and asked for an explainer.

> 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.

That's because this post is about HDR and not color management, which is different topic.

> That's because this post is about HDR

It's about HDR from the perspective of still photography, in your app, on iOS, in the context of hand-held mobile devices. The post's title ("What Is HDR, Anyway?"), content level and focus would be appropriate in the context of your company's social media feeds for users of your app - which is probably the audience and context it was written for. However in the much broader context of HN, a highly technical community whose interests in imaging are diverse, the article's content level and narrow focus aren't consistent with the headline title. It seems written at a level appropriate for novice users.

If this post was titled "How does Halide handle HDR, anyway?" or even "How should iOS photo apps handle HDR, anyway?" I'd have no objection about the title's promise not matching the content for the HN audience. When I saw the post's headline I thought "Cool! We really need a good technical deep dive into the mess that is HDR - including tech, specs, standards, formats, content acquisition, distribution and display across content types including stills, video clips and cinematic story-telling and diverse viewing contexts from phones to TVs to cinemas to VR." When I started reading and the article only used photos to illustrate concepts best conveyed with color gradient graphs PLUS photos, I started to feel duped by the title.

(Note: I don't use iOS or your app but the photo comparison of the elderly man near the end of the article confused me. From my perspective (video, cinematography and color grading), the "before" photo looks like a raw capture with flat LUT (or no LUT) applied. Yet the text seemed to imply Halide's feature was 'fixing' some problem with the image. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding since I don't know the tool(s) or workflow but I don't see anything wrong with the original image. It's what you want in a flat capture for later grading.)