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What is HDR, anyway?

(www.lux.camera)
789 points _kush | 1 comments | 14 May 25 12:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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CarVac ◴[14 May 25 13:42 UTC] No.43984442[source]▶
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.

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NBJack ◴[14 May 25 14:22 UTC] No.43984906[source]▶
HDR is really hard to get right apparently. It seems to get worse in video games too.

I'm a huge fan of Helldivers 2, but playing the game in HDR gives me a headache: the muzzle flash of weapons at high RPMs on a screen that goes to 240hz is basically a continuous flashbang for my eyes.

For a while, No Mans' Sky in HDR mode was basically the color saturation of every planet dialed up to 11.

The only game I've enjoyed at HDR was a port from a console, Returnal. The use of HDR brights was minimalistic and tasteful, often reserved for certain particle effects.

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1. qingcharles ◴[14 May 25 23:10 UTC] No.43990145[source]▶
A lot of this is poor QA. When you start to do clever things like HDR you have to test on a bunch of properly calibrated devices of different vendors etc. And if you're targeting Windows you have to accept that HDR is a mess for consumers and even if their display supports, their GPU supports it, they might still have the drivers and color profiles misconfigured. (and many apps are doing it wrong or weird, even when they say they support it)

Also (mostly) on Windows, or on videos for your TV: a lot of cheap displays that say they are HDR are a range of hot garbage.