As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.
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.
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 utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and looking at it on a phone or PC screen. The pic fails to capture what your eyes see for lighting range.
Also the maximum brightness isn't even that bright at 800 nits, so no HDR content really looks that different. I think newer OLEDs are brighter though. I'm still happy with the screen in general, even in SDR the OLED really shines. But it made me aware not all HDR screens are equal.
Also, in my very short experiment using HDR for daily work I ran into several problems, 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.
HDR full screen content: Yes.
HDR general desktop usage: No. In fact you'll probably actively dislike it to the point of just turning it off entirely. The ecosystem just isn't ready for this yet, although with things like the "constrained-high" concepts ( https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-hdr-1/#the-dynamic-range-lim... ) this might, and hopefully does, change & improve to a more pleasing result
Also this is assuming an HDR monitor that's also a good match for your ambient environment. The big thing nobody really talks about wiith HDR is that it's really dominated by how dark you're able to get your surrounding environment such that you can push your display "brightness" (read: SDR whitepoint) lower and lower. OLED HDR monitors, for example, look fantastic in SDR and fantastic in HDR in a dark room, but if you have typical office lighting and so you want an SDR whitepoint of around 200-300 nits? Yeah, they basically don't do HDR at all anymore at that point.
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.
Like totally washed out
If you have say a 400 nits display the HDR may actually look worse than SDR. So it really depends on your screen.
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.
Early HDR screens were very limited (limited dimming zones, buggy implementation) but if you get one post 2024 (esp the oled ones) they are quite decent. However it needs to be supported at many layers: not just the monitor, but also the operating system, and the content. There are not many games with proper HDR implementation; and even if there is, it may be bad and look worse — the OS can hijack the rendering pipeline and provide HDR map for you (Nvidia RTX HDR) which is a gamble: it may look bleh, but sometimes also better than the native HDR implementation the game has).
But when everything works properly, wow it looks amazing.
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.
This matches my experience; 0 to 5 look identically black if I turn off HDR
But like if you can't see a difference between 0 to 5 in a test pattern like this https://images.app.goo.gl/WY3FhCB1okaRANc28 in SDR but you can in HDR then that just means your SDR factory calibration is bad, or you've fiddled with settings that broke it.
I'd also be interested in hearing whether it makes sense to look into OLED HDR 400 screens (Samsung, LG) or is it really necessary to get an Asus ProArt which can push the same 1000 nits average as the Apple XDR display (which, mind you, is IPS).
On my Macbook Pro only activates when it needs to but honestly I've only seen one video [1] that impressed me with it, the rest was completely meh. Not sure if its because it's mostly iPhone photography you see in HDR which is overall pretty meh looking anyway.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwCFY6pmaYY I understand this isn't a true HDR process but someone messing with it in post, but it's the only video I've seen that noticeably shows you colors you can't see on a screen otherwise.
As others here have said, OLED monitors are generally excellent at reproducing a HDR signal, especially in a darker space. But they're terrible for productivity work because they'll get burned in for images that don't change a lot. They're fantastic for movies and gaming, though.
There are a few good non-OLED HDR monitors, but not many. I have an AOC Q27G3XMN; its a 27" 1440p 180hz monitor that is good for entry-level HDR, especially in brighter rooms. It has over 1000 nits of brightness, and no major flaws. It only has 336 backlight zones, though, so you might notice some blooming around subtitles or other fine details where there's dark and light content close together. (VA panels are better than IPS at suppressing that, though.) It's also around half the price of a comparable OLED.
Most of the other non-OLED monitors with good HDR support have some other deal-breaking flaws or at least major annoyances, like latency, screwing up SDR content, buggy controls, etc. The Monitors Unboxed channel on YouTube and rtngs.com are both good places to check.
And thats now that all the LEDs are still fresh. I can't imagine how bad it will be in a few years.
Also, a lot of Software doesn't expect the subpixel arrangement, so text will often look terrible.
For desktop work, don't bother unless your work involves HDR content.
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.
I set my screen brightness to a certain level for a reason. Please don’t just arbitrarily turn up the brightness!
There is no good way to disable HDR on photos for iPhone, either. Sure, you can turn off the HDR on photos on your iphone. But then, when you cast to a different display, the TV tries to display the photos in HDR, and it won’t look half as good.
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
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.
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.
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.
In contrast, my TV will change brightness modes to display HDR content and disables some of the brightness adjustments when displaying HDR content. It can be very uncomfortably bright in a dark room while being excessively dim in a bright room. It requires adjusting settings to a middle ground resulting in a mixed/mediocre experience overall. My wife’s laptop is the worst of all our devices, while reviews seem to praise the display, it has an overreactive adaptive brightness that cannot be disabled (along with decent G2G response but awful B2W/W2B response that causes ghosting).
I think it's because no one wants it.
edit: Ah, nevermind. It seems Firefox is doing some sort of post-processing (maybe bad tonemapping?) on-the-fly as the pictures start out similar but degrade to washed out after some time. In particular, the "OVERTHROW BOXING CLUB" photo makes this quite apparent.
That's a damn shame Firefox. C'mon, HDR support feels like table stakes at this point.
edit2: Apparently it's not table stakes.
> Browser support is halfway there. Google beat Apple to the punch with their own version of Adaptive HDR they call Ultra HDR, which Chrome 14 now supports. Safari has added HDR support into its developer preview, then it disabled it, due to bugs within iOS.
at which point I would just say to `lux.camera` authors - why not put a big fat warning at the top for users with a Firefox or Safari (stable) browser? With all the emphasis on supposedly simplifying a difficult standard, the article has fallen for one of its most famous pitfalls.
"It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people."
Yep, and you've made it even worse for a huge chunk of people. :shrug: Great article n' all just saying.
Second, the HDR effect seems to be implemented in a very crude way, which causes the whole Android UI (including the Android status bar at the top) to become brighter when HDR content is on screen. That's clearly not right. Though, of course, this might also be some issue of Android rather than Chrome, or perhaps of the Qualcomm graphics driver for my Adreno GPU, etc.
A lot of these design flaws are fixed by Firefox's picture in picture option but for some reason, with the way you coded it, the prompt to pop it out as PIP doesn't show up
"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.
Color management and handling HDR in UIs is probably a bit out of scope.
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.
To be fair, it would be pretty weird if you found your own post off-putting :P
I predict HDR content on the web will eventually be disabled or mitigated on popular browsers similarly to how auto-playing audio content is no longer allowed [1]
Spammers and advertisers haven't caught on yet to how abusively attention grabbing eye-searingly bright HDR content can be, but any day now they will and it'll be everywhere.
1. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/firefox-66-to-block-automa...
About HDR on phones, I think they are the blight of photography. No more shadows and highlights. I find they are good at capturing family moments, but not as a creative tool.
I still use it myself but I need to redo the build system and release it with an updated LibRaw... not looking forward to that.
All this aside, HDR and high brightness are different things - HDR is just a representational thing. You can go full send on your SDR monitor as well, you'll just see more banding. The majority of the article is just content marketing about how they perform automatic tonemapping anyways.
That’s a consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye). If you look at 1000 nits on a display in bright sunlight, with your eyes adapted to the bright surroundings, the display would look rather dim.
Literal snort.
This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.
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".
People in the HN echo chamber over-estimate hardware adoption rates. For example, there are millions of people who went straight from CDs to streaming, without hitting the iPod era.
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.
Normal people aren't magpies who trash their kit every time something shiny comes along.
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.
1: Well my car would play MP3s burned to CDs in its CD player; not sure if that counts.
Don't feel like you have to. I bought a giant fancy TV with it, and even though it's impressive, it's kinda like ultra-hifi-audio. I don't miss it when I watch the same show on one of my older TVs.
If you ever do get it, I suggest doing for a TV that you watch with your full attention, and watching TV / movies in the dark. It's not very useful on a TV that you might turn on while doing housework; but very useful when you are actively watching TV with your full attention.
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).
https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth....
https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac...
https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...
It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional.
I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers.
Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
This. I can always tell when someone "gets" software development when they either understand (or don't) that computers can't read minds or infer intent like a person can.
My understanding is most SDR TVs and computer screens have displays about 200-300 nits (aka cd/m²). Is that the correct measure of the range of the display? The brightest white is 300 nits brighter than the darkest black?
4ad•2h ago
the__alchemist•2h ago
4ad•2h ago
From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-referred images and video, along with a set of standards for reproduction.
cornstalks•2h ago
And no, it's not necessarily absolute luminance. PQ is absolute, HLG is not.
skhameneh•1h ago
Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR. I would share more insight, if I had it. I thought I understood color profiles well, but I have encountered some challenges when trying to display in one, edit in another, and print “correctly”. And every device seems to treat color profiles a little bit differently.
kllrnohj•1h ago
All transfer functions can generally work on either integer range or floating point. They basically just describe a curve shape, and you can have that curve be over the range of 0.0-1.0 just as easily as you can over 0-255 or 0-1023.
Extended sRGB is about the only thing that basically requires floating point, as it specifically describes 0.0-1.0 as being equivalent to sRGB and then has a valid range larger than that (you end up with something like -.8 to 2.4 or greater). And representing that in integer domain is conceptually possible but practically not really.
> Also DCI-P3 should fit in here somewhere, as it seems to be the most standardized color space for HDR.
BT2020 is the most standardized color space for HDR. DCI-P3 is the most common color gamut of HDR displays that you can actually afford, however, but that's a smaller gamut than what most HDR profiles expect (HDR10, HDR10+, and "professional" DolbyVision are all BT2020 - a wider gamut than P3). Which also means most HDR content specifies a color gamut it doesn't actually benefit from having as all that HDR content is still authored to only use somewhere between the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamut since that's all anyone who views it will actually have.
cornstalks•37m ago
The math uses real numbers but table 2-4 ("Digital representation") discusses how the signal is quantized to/from analog and digital. The signal is quantized to integers.
This same quantization process is done for sRGB, BT.709, BT.2020, etc. so it's not unique to HLG. It's just how digital images/video are stored.
kllrnohj•2h ago
pavlov•2h ago