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What is HDR, anyway?

(www.lux.camera)
790 points _kush | 1 comments | 14 May 25 12:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gyomu ◴[14 May 25 13:44 UTC] No.43984462[source]▶
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.

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sandofsky ◴[14 May 25 13:59 UTC] No.43984641[source]▶
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.

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tart-lemonade ◴[14 May 25 16:14 UTC] No.43986273[source]▶
> YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold.

For anyone else who was confused by this, it seems to be a client-side audio compressor feature (not a server-side adjustment) labeled as "Stable Volume". On the web, it's toggleable via the player settings menu.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14106294

I can't find exactly when it appeared but the earliest capture of the help article was from May 2024, so it is a relatively recent feature: https://web.archive.org/web/20240523021242/https://support.g...

I didn't realize this was a thing until just now, but I'm glad they added it because (now that I think about it) it's been awhile since I felt the need to adjust my system volume when a video was too quiet even at 100% player volume. It's a nice little enhancement.

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1. ignaloidas ◴[14 May 25 21:36 UTC] No.43989477[source]▶
Youtube has been long normalizing videos standard feed, switching to a -14 LUFS target in 2019. But LUFS is a global target, and is meant to allow higher peaks and troughs over the whole video, and the normalization does happen on a global level - if you exceed it by 3dB, then the whole video gets it's volume lowered by 3dB, no matter if the part is quiet or not.

The stable volume thing is meant to essentially level out all of the peaks and troughs, and IIRC it's actually computed server-side, I think yt-dlp can download stable volume streams if asked to.