What is HDR, anyway?

HDR on displays is actually largely uncomfortable for me. They should reserve the brightest HDR whites for things like the sun itself and caustics, not white walls in indoor photos.

As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.

There's a pretty good video on YouTube (more than one, actually) that explains how careless use of HDR in modern cinema is destroying the look and feel of cinema we used to like.

Everything is flattened, contrast is eliminated, lights that should be "burned white" for a cinematic feel are brought back to "reasonable" brightness with HDR, really deep blacks are turned into flat greys, etc. The end result is the flat and washed out look of movies like Wicked. It's often correlated to CGI-heavy movies, but in reality it's starting to affect every movie.

The washed out grey thing was an error that became a style!

Because HDR wasn’t natively supported on most displays and software, for a long time it was just “hacked in there” by squashing the larger dynamic range into a smaller one using a mathematical transform, usually a log function. When viewed without the inverse transform this looks horribly grey and unsaturated.

Directors and editors would see this aesthetic day in, day out, with the final color grade applied only after a long review process.

Some of them got used to it and even liking it, and now here we are: horribly washed out movies made to look like that on purpose.