Interesting article on HDR

[Ketch Rossi]

I believe Jake is 100% right here. We've been compressing the dynamic range of images for many, many years, just from film and regular HD cameras, let alone contemporary wide-range CMOS cameras.

Anybody who doubts this, read Dolby's paper on Dolby Vision:

http://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-vision/dolby-vision-white-paper.pdf

I know He is, and I wrote about Dolby vision on my very first reply... And also posted a link... Not only that been that I am working with some serious industry players on some HDR stuff, I am extremely well informed and knowledgeable about what Dolby has been doing...

But there is more to it... Or at list so we hope...

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

HDR and tone mapping are not the same thing as are HDR and HDRx.

While tone mapping does deserve a lot of the negative comments it receives, tone mapping is used by Dolby Vision and other HDR playback solutions to make the HDR content looks its best on a given HDR display. The idea is the mastering display has a wider gamut and more light output than the display you are watching it on at home and therefor tone mapping is used to "make it fit" for lack of a better phrase. Those would be good examples of tone mapping unlike the million bad examples that show up when you Google it.

I'm going to go down one more pedantic level since HDR seems to be the most misunderstood of all imaging technologies due to loose terminology. Gamma is "tone mapping". An s-curve of contrast is "tone mapping". HDR is not synonymous with Tone mapping as you say, HDR is just a nice wide latitude image. However tone mapping also isn't the "HDR effect" that everybody hates. It's *localized tone mapping* that looks like shit. Tone mapping is good and essential, every time you mess with a curve you're tone mapping. Once you start splitting your adjustments based luminance masks like localized tone mapping things start to look "weird".

BTW the lovely thing about HDR displays is that you don't need localized tone mapping because the goal of localized tone mapping is to take the massive dynamic range of a modern sensor like the Dragon (16+ stops) and pack it into an 8bit 8ish stop display. With HDR you are just theoretically reproducing reality with the full 16 stops so your eyeballs and brain will do authentic localized tone mapping at the retinal and cerebral level.

On another complete wild tangent, this is part of the reason why I'm like giddy about future wide color gamut. You know how bad mixed color temperature looks on film and video but looks fine in real-life... if we can reproduce the wide color gamut of the real-world we can start to shoot mixed color temperature, and then just display in the real-world's non-compressed gamut space and let the human brain do its thing. The less information we throw away and the closer we are to simply re-displaying exactly what it looked like when it was captured the more post work we can hand off to the brain to deal with. The brain is really good at tone mapping and handling mixed color temperatures and all kind of difficult lighting situations that just can't possibly be dealt with in low gamut, low dynamic range display.

 

[Stacey Spears]

I'm going to go down one more pedantic level

Nothing wrong with pedantic. Why do you suppose that the term tone mapping is so popular with HDR?

know how bad mixed color temperature looks on film and video but looks fine in real-life...

That could be an interesting test / demo clip.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Nicely put Gavin...