What is HDR, anyway?

Samsung also makes sensors for phones. IIRC some Pixels use their sensors.

He worked mostly on the software side, but of course had important input into what sensors and processors were chosen for the phones.

> Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like

Ignoring film grain, our vision has all these effects all the same.

Look in front of you and only a single plane will be in focus (and only your fovea produces any sort of legibility). Look towards a bright light and you might get flaring from just your eyes. Stare out the side of a car or train when driving at speed and you'll see motion blur, interrupted only by brief clarity if you intentionally try to follow the motion with your eyes.

Without depth of field simulation, the whole scene is just a flat plane with completely unrealistic clarity, and because it's comparatively small, too much of it is smack center on your fovea. The problem is that these are simulations that do not track your eyes, and make the (mostly valid!) assumption that you're looking, nearby or in front of whatever you're controlling.

Maybe motion blur becomes unneccessary given a high enough resolution and refresh rate, but depth of field either requires actual depth or foveal tracking (which only works for one person). Tasteful application of current techniques is probably better.

> High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."

Ugh. I will never understand the obsession this effect. There is no such thing as a "soap opera effect" as people liek to call it, only a slideshow effect.

The history behind this is purely a series of cost-cutting measures entirely unrelated to the user experience or artistic qualities. 24 fps came to be because audio was slapped onto the film, and was the slowest speed where the audio track was acceptable intelligible, saving costly film paper - the sole priority of the time. Before that, we used to record content at variable frame rates but play it back at 30-40 fps.

We're clinging on to a cost-cutting measure that was a significant compromise from the time of hand cranked film recording.

</fist-shaking rant>

> the poster found it via StumbleUpon.

Such a blast from the past, I used to spend so much time just clicking that button!

Check out this old post: https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/

HDR in games would frequently mean clipping highlights and adding bloom. Prior the "HDR" exposure looked rather flat.

The “HDR” here is in the sense of “tone mapping to SDR”. Should also be said that even “H” DR displays only have a stop or two of more range, still much less than in a real-world high-contrast scenes

Hell yeah, this one of many issues I had with the first Avatar movie. The movie was so filled with cool things to look at but none of it was in focus. 10 minutes in I had had enough and was ready for a more traditional movie experience. Impressive yes, for 10 minutes, then exhausting.

Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a very narrow viewing angle).

It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye.

Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird.

When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium.

I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.

This! Yes I think you’re absolutely right. The term “HDR” is in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time when the most popular image formats and most common displays were not very sophisticated about colors.

That said, there is one important part that is often lost. One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture absolute values in physical units, rather than relative brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and paper and TVs don’t have. Some new displays are getting absolute brightness features, but historically most media display relative color values.

The term "HDR" arguably makes more sense for the effect achieved by tone mapping multiple exposures of the same subject onto a "normal" (e.g. SRGB) display. In this case, the "high" in "HDR" just means "from a source with higher dynamic range than the display."

> but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window.

Owning a display that can do 1300+ nits sustained across a 100% window has been the biggest display upgrade I think I have ever had. It's given me a tolerance for LCD, a technology I've hated since the death of CRTs and turned me away from OLED.

There was a time I would have said i'd never own a non OLED display again. But a capable HDR display changed that logic in a big way.

Too bad the motion resolution on it, especially compared to OLED is meh. Again, at one point, motion was the most important aspect to me (its why I still own CRTs) but this level of HDR...transformative for lack of a better word.

> It's even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens!

I came here to point this out. You have a pretty high dynamic range in the captured medium, and then you can use the tools you have to darken or lighten portions of the photograph when transferring it to paper.

Contact printing on azo certainly helped!

I think about the Ansel Adams zone system

https://www.kimhildebrand.com/how-to-use-the-zone-system/

where my interpretation is colored by the experience of making high quality prints and viewing them under different conditions, particularly poor illumination quality but you could also count "small handheld game console", "halftone screened and printed on newsprint" as other degraded conditions. In those cases you might imagine that the eye can only differentiate between 11 tones so even if an image has finer detail it ought to connect well with people if colors were quantized. (I think about concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon which looked great printed with a thermal printer because it was designed to look great on a cheap screen.)

In my mind, the ideal image would look good quantized to 11 zones but also has interesting detail in texture in 9 of the zones (extreme white and black don't show texture). That's a bit of an oversimplification (maybe a shot outdoors in the snow is going to trend really bright, maybe for artistic reasons you want things to be really dark, ...) but Ansel Adams manually "tone mapped" his images using dodging, burning and similar techniques to make it so.

Literally the sentence preceding the one you quoted is “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?”.

> Film negatives have 12-stops of useful dynamic range

No, that’s not inherently true. AA used 12 zones, that doesn’t mean every negative stock has 12 stops of latitude. Stocks are different, you need to look at the curves.

But yes most modern negatives are very forgiving. FP4 for example has barely any shoulder at all iirc.

I agree capture, format and display are closely related. But HDR capture and processing specifically developed outside of HDR display devices, and use of HDR displays changes how HDR images are used compared to LDR displays.

> The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words

Hey I’m sorry for criticizing, but I honestly feel like you’re being slightly misleading here. The sentence “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?” is explicitly claiming that analog photographers use “HDR” capture, and the Ansel Adams sentence that follows appears to be merely a specific example of your claim. The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact claim Adams used HDR, even if you didn’t quite intend to.

I think you’re either misunderstanding me a little, or maybe unaware of some of the context of HDR and its development as a term of art in the computer graphics community. Film’s 12 stops is not really “high” range by HDR standards, and a little exposure latitude isn’t where “HDR” came from. The more important part of HDR was the intent to push toward absolute physical units like luminance. That doesn’t just enable deferred exposure, it enables physical and perceptual processing in ways that aren’t possible with film. It enables calibrated integration with CG simulation that isn’t possible with film. And it enables a much wider rage of exposure push/pull than you can do when going from 12 stops to 8. And of course non-destructive digital deferred exposure at display time is quite different from a print exposure.

Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a counterpart called LDR that’s referring to 8 bits/channel RGB. With analog photography, there is no LDR, thus zero reason to invent the notion of a ‘higher’ range. Higher than what? High relative to what? Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want. There is no ‘high’ range in analog photos, there’s just range. HDR was invented to push against and evolve beyond the de-facto digital practices of the 70s-90s, it is not a statement about what range can be captured by a camera.

For a year or two after it launched, The Division 2 was a really, really good example of HDR done right. The game had (has?) a day/night cycle, and it had a really good control of the brightness throughout the day. More importantly, it made very good use of the wide color gamut available to it.

I stopped playing that game for several years, and when I went back to it, the color and brightness had been wrecked to all hell. I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's part of why they ruined their game's renderer.

Some games that I think currently have good HDR:

* Lies of P

* Hunt: Showdown 1896

* Monster Hunter: World (if you increase the game's color saturation a bit from its default settings)

Some games that had decent-to-good HDR the last time I played them, a few years ago:

* Battlefield 1

* Battlefield V

* Battlefield 2042 (If you're looking for a fun game, I do NOT recommend this one. Also, the previous two are probably chock-full of cheaters these days.)

I found Helldivers 2's HDR mode to have blacks that were WAY too bright. In SDR mode, nighttime in forest areas was dark. In HDR mode? It was as if you were standing in the middle of a field during a full moon.

It's like the bloom menace all over again - all new rendering tech gets overused so you can't miss it before developers learn to restrain themselves.

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.

What we really need is some standards that everybody follows. The reason normal displays work so well is that everyone settled on sRGB, and as long as a display gets close to that, say 95% sRGB, everyone except maybe a few graphics designers will have a n equivalent experience.

But HDR, it's a minefield of different display qualities, color spaces, standards. It's no wonder that nobody gets it right and everyone feels confused.

HDR on a display that has peak brightness of 2000 nits will look completely different than a display with 800 nits, and they both get to claim they are HDR.

We should have a standard equivalent to color spaces. Set, say, 2000 nits as 100% of HDR. Then a 2000 nit display gets to claim it's 100% HDR. A 800 nit display gets to claim 40% HDR, etc. A 2500 nit display could even use 125% HDR in it's marketing.

It's still not perfect - some displays (OLED) can only show peak brightness over a portion of the screen. But it would be an improvement.

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.

> 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.

Instagram has to allow HDR for the same reason that Firefox spent the past twenty years displaying web colors like HN orange at maximum display gamut rather than at sRGB calibrated: because a brighter red than anyone else’s draws people in, and makes the competition seem lifeless by comparison, especially in a mixed-profiles environment. Eventually that is regarded as ‘garishly bright’, so to speak, and people push back against it. I assume Firefox is already fixing this to support the latest CSS color spec (which defines #rrggbb as sRGB and requires it to be presented as such unless stated otherwise in CSS), but I doubt Instagram is willing to literally dim their feed; instead, I would expect them to begin AI-HDR’ing SDR uploads in order that all videos are captivatingly, garishly, bright.

> I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log luminance or some other reasonable metric.

I completely understand the desire to address the issue of content authors misusing or intentionally abusing HDR with some kind of auto-limiting algorithm similar to the way the radio 'loudness wars' were addressed. Unfortunately, I suspect it will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without also negatively impacting some content applying HDR correctly for artistically expressive purposes. Static photos may be solvable without excessive false positive over-correction but cinematic video is much more challenging due to the dynamic nature of the content.

As a cinemaphile, I'm starting to wonder if maybe HDR on mobile devices simply isn't a solvable problem in practice. While I think it's solvable technically and certainly addressable from a standards perspective, the reality of having so many stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem (hardware, OS, app, content distributors, original creators) with diverging priorities makes whatever we do from a base technology and standards perspective unlikely to work in practice for most users. Maybe I'm too pessimistic but as a high-end home theater enthusiast I'm continually dismayed how hard it is to correctly display diverse HDR content from different distribution sources in a less complex ecosystem where the stakeholders are more aligned and the leading standards bodies have been around for many decades (SMPTE et al).

> because bad HDR likely makes view counts go up

Another related parallel trend recently is that bad AI images get very high view and like counts, so much so that I've lost a lot of motivation for doing real photography because the platforms cease to show them to anyone, even my own followers.

Why is nobody talking about the standards development? They (OS, image formats) could just say all stuff by default assumes SDR and if a media file explicitly calls for HDR even then it cannot have sharp transitions except in special cases, and the software just blocks or truncates any non conforming images. The OS should have had something like this for sound, about 25-30 years ago. For example a brightness aware OS/monitor combo could just outright disallow anything about x nits. And disallow certain contrast levels, in the majority of content.

FYI: You wrote Chrome 14 in the post, but I believe you meant Android 14.

Btw, YouTube doesn't moderate HDR either. I saw one video of a child's violin recital that was insanely bright, and probably just by accident of using a bad HDR recorder.

The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in the article

> To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings.

You might be on to something there. Technically, HDR is mostly about profile signaling and therefore about interop. To support it in mpeg dash or hls media you need to make sure certain codec attributes are mentioned in the xml or m3u8 but the actual media payload stays the same.

Any bit or Bob being misconfigured or misinterpreted in the streaming pipeline will result in problems ranging from slightly suboptimal experience to nothing works.

Besides HDR, "spatial audio" formats like Dolby Atmos are notorious for interop isuues

> To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings.

On both Android & iOS/MacOS it's not that HDR is ignoring your screen brightness, but rather the brightness slider is controlling the SDR range and then yes HDR can exceed that, that's the singular purpose of HDR to be honest. All the other purported benefits of HDR are at best just about HDR video profiles and at worst just nonsense bullshit. The only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter colors vs. SDR. When used selectively this really enhances a scene. But restraint is hard, and most forms of HDR content production are shit. The HDR images that newer iPhones and Pixel phones are capturing are generally quite good because they are actually restrained, but then ironically both of them have horrible HDR video that's just obnoxiously bright.

Apple’s method involves a good deal of what they call “EDR”, wherein the display gamma is ramped down in concert with ramping the brightness up, so that the brighter areas get brighter while the non-bright areas remain dark due to gamma math; that term is helpful for searching their WWDC developer videos for more details.

If you mean https://i.imgur.com/0LtYuDZ.jpeg that is probably the slider GP wants but it's not about matching HDR white to SDR white, it's just about clamping the peak HDR brightness in its own consideration. The white on the left is the HDR brightness according to a certain value in nits set via the bottom slider. The white on the right is the maximally bright HDR signal. The goal of adjusting the slider is to find how bright of an HDR white your display can actually produce, which is the lowest slider value at which the two whites appear identical to a viewer.

Some games also have a separate slider https://i.imgur.com/wenBfZY.png for adjusting "paper white", which is the HDR white one might normally associate with matching to SDR reference white (100 nits when in a dark room according to the SDR TV color standards, higher in other situations or standards). Extra note: the peak brightness slider in this game (Red Dead Redemption 2) is the same knob as the brightness slider in the above Battlefield V screenshot)

>HDR support is very lacking in PCs atm.

I think it's because no one wants it.

HDR marketing on monitors almost seems like a scam. Monitors will claim HDR compatibility when what they actually means is they will take the HDR data stream and display it exactly the same as SDR content because they don't actually have the contrast and brightness ability of a proper HDR monitor.

Funny enough HDR content works absolutely perfect as long as it stays on device that has both HDR-recording and display tech, aka smartphones.

The problem starts with sending HDR content to SDR-only devices, or even just other HDR-standards. Not even talking about printing here.

This step can inherently only be automated so much, because it's also a stylistic decision on what information to keep or emphasize. This is an editorial process, not something you want to emburden casual users with. What works for some images can't work for others. Even with AI the preference would still need to be aligned.

How would I know if my android phone has an HDR screen?

[edit]

Some googling suggested I check in the Netflix app; at least Netflix thinks my phone does not support HDR. (Unihertz Jelly Max)

I honestly do not know if I have any screen that supports HDR. At least I've never noticed any improved image quality when viewing HDR video content and compare the image on my M3 Macbook Pro screen vs. an old external IPS monitor. Maybe my eyes are just broken?

I have a screen which is "HDR" but what that means is when you turn the feature on it just makes everything more muted, it doesn't actually have any more dynamic range. When you turn HDR on for a game it basically just makes most things more muddy grey.

I also have a screen which has a huge gamut and blows out colors in a really nice way (a bit like the aftereffects of hallucinogens, it has colors other screens just don't) and you don't have to touch any settings.

My OLED TV has HDR and it actually seems like HDR content makes a difference while regular content is still "correct".

I totally love HDR on my OLED TV, and definitely miss it on others.

Like a lot of things, it’s weird how some people are more sensitive to visual changes. For example:

- At this point, I need 120hz displays. I can easily notice when my wife’s phone is in power saver mode at 60hz.

- 4k vs 1080p. This is certainly more subtle, but I definitely miss detail in lower res content.

- High bitrate. This is way more important than 4k vs 1080p or even HDR. But it’s so easy to tell when YouTube lowers the quality setting on me, or when a TV show is streaming at a crappy bitrate.

- HDR is tricky, because it relies completely on the content creator to do a good job producing HDR video. When done well, the image basically sparkles, water looks actually wet, parts of the image basically glow… it looks so good.

I 100% miss this HDR watching equivalent content on other displays. The problem is that a lot of content isn’t produced to take advantage of this very well. The HDR 4k Blu-ray of several Harry Potter movies, for example, has extremely muted colors and dark scenes… so how is the image going to pop? I’m glad we’re seeing more movies rely on bright colors and rich, contrasty color grading. There are so many old film restorations that look excellent in HDR because the original color grade had rich, detailed, contrasty colors.

On top of that, budget HDR implementations, ESPECIALLY in PC monitors, just don’t get very bright. Which means their HDR is basically useless. It’s impossible to replicate the “shiny, wet look” of really good HDR water if the screen can’t get bright enough to make it look shiny. Plus, it needs to be selective about what gets bright, and cheap TVs don’t have a lot of backlighting zones to make that happen very well.

So whereas I can plug in a 4k 120hz monitor and immediately see the benefit in everything I do for normal PC stuff, you can’t get that with HDR unless you have good source material and a decent display.

I don't either see a point of having 4K TV vs 1080p TV. To me is just marketing, I have at my house both a 4K and a 1080p and from a normal viewing distance (that is 3/4 meters) you don't see differences.

Also in my country (Italy) TV transmissions are 1080i at best, a lot are still 570i (PAL resolution). Streaming media can be 4K (if you have enough bandwidth to stream it at that resolution, which I don't have at my house). Sure, if you download pirated movies you find it at 4K, and if you have the bandwidth to afford it... sure.

But even there, sometimes is better a well done 1080p movie than an hyper compressed 4K one, since you see compression artifacts.

To me 1080p, and maybe even 720p, is enough for TV vision. Well, sometimes I miss the CRT TVs, they where low resolution but for example had a much better picture quality than most modern 4K LCD TV where black scenes are gray (I know there is OLED, but is too expensive and has other issues).

> A few years ago on HN, there was someone who couldn't wrap their brain around the notion that even though VCRs were invented in the early 1960's that in 1980, not everyone owned one, or if they did, they only had one for the whole family.

Point of clarification: While the technology behind the VCR was invented in the '50s and matured in the '60s, consumer-grade video tape systems weren't really a thing until Betamax and VHS arrived in 1975 and 1976 respectively.

Early VCRs were also incredibly expensive, with prices ranging from $3,500 to almost $10,000 after adjusting for inflation. Just buying into the VHS ecosystem at the entry level was a similar investment to buying an Apple Vision Pro today.

>there are millions of people who went straight from CDs to streaming, without hitting the iPod era

Who?

There was about a decade there where everyone who had the slightest interest in music had an mp3 player of some kind, at least in the 15-30 age bracket.

> HDR gaming: Yes.

The difference is absolutely stunning in some games.

In MS Flight Simulator 2024, going from SDR to HDR goes from looking like the computer game it is to looking life-like. Deeper shadows with brighter highlights makes the scene pop in ways that SDR just can't do.

EDIT: You'll almost certainly need an OLED monitor to really appreciate it, though. Local dimming isn't good enough.

I use HDR for general usage, Windows ruins non-HDR content when HDR is enabled due to their choice of sRGB tf. Luckily every Linux DE has chosen to use the gamma 2.2 tf, and looks fine for general usage.

I use a mini-led monitor, and its quite decent, except for starfields, & makes it very usable even in bright conditions, and HDR video still is better in bright conditions than the equivalent SDR video.

https://github.com/dylanraga/win11hdr-srgb-to-gamma2.2-icm

Every few years I turn on that HDR toggle for my desktop PC, and it never lasts longer than a day or two.

Top tip: If you have HDR turned on for your display in Windows (at least, MacOS not tested) and then share your screen in Teams, your display will look weirdly dimmed for everyone not using HDR on their display—which is everyone.

HDR on desktop in windows looks straight up broken on some HDR monitors I’ve tried

Like totally washed out

I think an OLED is basically an absolute necessity for HDR content.

My current monitor is an OLED and HDR in games looks absolutely amazing. My previous was an IPS that supported HDR, but turning it on caused the backlight to crank to the max, destroying black levels and basically defeating the entire purpose of HDR. Local dimming only goes so far.

Avoid cranking up the OLED brightness over 70% for static content and absolutely never drive SDR-Reds into the HDR range by using fake HDR-modes when having brightness high.

I have a LG 2018 OLED that has some burnt in Minecraft hearts because of that, not from Minecraft itself, but just a few hours of minecraft Youtube video in those settings from the built in youtube client, but virtually no other detectable issues after excessive years of use with static content.

You only see them with fairly uniform colors as a background where color banding would usually be my bigger complaint.

So burn-ins definitely happen, but they are far from being a deal breaker over the obvious benefits you get vs other types of displays.

And driving everything possible in dark mode (white text on dark bg) on those displays is even the logical thing to do. Then you dont need much max brightness anyway and even save some energy.

> A lot of monitors that advertise HDR support really shouldn't. Many of them can decode the signal but don't have the hardware to accurately reproduce it,

You can lie as much as you like as an advertiser. At the beginning, HD meant 1080p. Then, 1080p became FullHD, only that 720p to became HD and to make HD digital television possible. (the original SD television is worse than analog)

> You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you can see is so much expanded.

Note that HDR only actually changes how bright things can get. There's zero difference in the dark regions. This is made confusing because HDR video marketing often claims it does, but it doesn't actually. HDR monitors do not, in general, have any advantage over SDR monitors in terms of the darks. Local dimming zones improve dark contrast. OLED improves dark contrast. Dynamic contrast improves dark contrast. But HDR doesn't.

> You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able to spot the faint dark spot

0-10 is so old century. Now it should be 0-2 (0 - default, 1 dark, 2 light,) /s

Honestly, I find the extended brightness FAR less important than the extended color gamut. I have a ~300 nit VA monitor that I'm generally quite happy with and that looks fantastic with well-built HDR renderers.

Given that monitors report information about their HDR minimum and maximum panel brightness capabilities to the machine they are connected to, any competently-built HDR renderer (whether that be for games or movies or whatever) will be able to take that information and adjust the picture appropriately.

> ...the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer.

To be pedantic, this has always been the case... Who the hell knows what bonkers "color enhancement" your recipient has going on on their end?

But (more seriously) it's very, very stupid that most systems out there will ignore color profile data embedded in pictures (and many video players ignore the same in videos [0]). It's quite possible to tone-map HDR stuff so it looks reasonable on SDR displays, but color management is like accessibility in that nearly noone who's in charge of paying for software development appears to give any shits about it.

[0] A notable exception to this is MPV. I can't recommend this video player highly enough.

Tbh, I'm glad this isn't supported in Firefox as of right now

Yeah, the HDR videos on my Asus Zenfone 9 (on Android 14) look like really terrible.

Which Android phone are you using?

On macOS even without HDR enabled on my display there's a striking difference due to better tone mapping between Safari and Firefox.

If I enable HDR the Firefox ones become a gray mess vs the lights feeling like actual lights in Safari.

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

To be fair, it would be pretty weird if you found your own post off-putting :P

> 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.)

Maybe my response was part of the broader HDR symptom—that the acronym is overloaded with different meanings depending on where you're coming from.

On the HN frontpage, people are likely thinking of one of at least three things:

HDR as display tech (hardware)

HDR as wide gamut data format (content)

HDR as tone mapping (processing)

...

So when the first paragraph says we finally explain what HDR actually means, it set me off on the wrong foot—it comes across pretty strongly for a term that’s notoriously context-dependent. Especially in a blog post that reads like a general explainer rather than a direct Q&A response when not coming through your apps channels.

Then followed up by The first HDR is the "HDR mode" introduced to the iPhone camera in 2010. caused me to write the comment.

For people over 35 with even the faintest interest in photography, the first exposure to the HDR acronym probably didn’t arrive with the iPhone in 2010, but HDR IS equivalent to Photomatix style tone mapping starting in 2005 as even mentioned later. The ambiguity of the term is a given now. I think it's futile to insist or police one meaning other the other in non-scientific informal communication, just use more specific terminology.

So the correlation of what HDR means or what sentiment it evokes in people by age group and self-assesed photography skill might be something worthwhile to explore.

The post get's a lot better after that. That said, I really did enjoy the depth. The dive into the classic dodge and burn and the linked YouTube piece. One explainer at a time makes sense—and tone mapping is a good place to start. Even tone mapping is fine in moderation :)

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.

This seems like a fairly easy problem to solve from a UX standpoint, even moreso than auto-playing audio/video. Present all pages in SDR by default, let the user click a button on the toolbar or url bar to toggle HDR rendering when HDR content is detected.

They haven't, but influencers certainly have, I get regular still images which are rendered as a video to get the HDR brightness boost in Instagram, etc.

When I complain about HDR it's because I've intentionally set the brightness of pure white to a comfortable level, and then suddenly parts of my screen are brighter than that. You fundamentally can't solve that problem with just better tone mapping, can you?

The bit about "confused" turns me off right away. The kind of high-pressure stereo salesman who hopes I am the kind of 'audiophile' who prevents me from calling myself an 'audiophile' (wants mercury-filled cables for a more 'fluid' sound) always presupposes the reader/listener is "confused".

But it's not the colloquial meaning, HDR is fairly well defined by e.g. ITU-R BT.2100, which addresses colorimetry, luminance and the corresponding transfer functions.