We seem to be at an inflection point where HDR photography could be about to become mainstream.
By this I mean using HDR-capable displays and full bit-rate images edited in the BT.2020 or DCI-P3 color space
Not fake HDR, where the output is still an 8 bit jpeg.
For some time now with a 10 bit (12bit frc) display like my then U2711 we could get a glimpse of what’s hidden in our raw files (with custom software in full screen mode to bypass gpu limitations…)
At this point I realized that one day we will be able to view the 10/12/14 bit data on our raw images eventually. The technology was already getting there in the 2010s but the software ecosystem basically didn’t exist.
Fast forward 15 years and now we can edit HDR images in Lightroom, then export them in the jxl and avif formats. (jxl is 16 bit)
The native windows photo viewer is also already able to handle these xl and avif formats correctly.
What’s seems missing is an online hdr capable gallery.
But what exactly is different, bit-depth, brightness, and gamma curve of the display? We have been editing in 16-bit space for decades, which is more data than we get from the cameras, especially at high ISO.
aCuria wrote:
We seem to be at an inflection point where HDR photography could be about to become mainstream.
By this I mean using HDR-capable displays and full bit-rate images edited in the BT.2020 or DCI-P3 color space
Not fake HDR, where the output is still an 8 bit jpeg.
For some time now with a 10 bit (12bit frc) display like my then U2711 we could get a glimpse of what’s hidden in our raw files (with custom software in full screen mode to bypass gpu limitations…)
At this point I realized that one day we will be able to view the 10/12/14 bit data on our raw images eventually. The technology was already getting there in the 2010s but the software ecosystem basically didn’t exist.
Fast forward 15 years and now we can edit HDR images in Lightroom, then export them in the jxl and avif formats. (jxl is 16 bit)
The native windows photo viewer is also already able to handle these xl and avif formats correctly.
What’s seems missing is an online hdr capable gallery.
there is some way for other people to view ...Show more →
The problem I have with virtually all of the HDR images that I have seen is that they grossly distort the composition and effects of light in the photo by wildly overemphasizing the highlights and the whites. This almost inevitably draws your eyes to the wrong spots in the image because they are so bright and underemphasizes where your eye should otherwise go.
In their striving for a dramatic effect, HDR photos mostly remind me of those black velvet, fluorescent Elvis "paintings" with glowing eyes and hair highlights from years ago.
Also, HDR effects can't really be reproduced in prints, which is my much-preferred display format for significant images.
I am open to the possibility that I just don't know how to use HDR. But i don't think that I have seen any images by anyone where I thought it worked as actually enhancing a visual image.
chiron wrote:
The problem I have with virtually all of the HDR images that I have seen is that they grossly distort the composition and effects of light in the photo by wildly overemphasizing the highlights and the whites. This almost inevitably draws your eyes to the wrong spots in the image because they are so bright and underemphasizes where your eye should otherwise go.
In their striving for a dramatic effect, HDR photos mostly remind me of those black velvet, fluorescent Elvis "paintings" with glowing eyes and hair highlights from years ago.
Also, HDR effects can't really be reproduced in prints, which is my much-preferred display format for significant images.
I am open to the possibility that I just don't know how to use HDR. But i don't think that I have seen any images by anyone where I thought it worked as actually enhancing a visual image....Show more →
You can benefit from the BT.2020 color volume without overemphasizing the highlights, how you edit your RAW file is completely up to you after all!
If you’ve used slide film, you’ll probably remember how dense and rich the colors are, with a kind of saturation and color richness that really punches way beyond what the best IPS displays have been able to reproduce.
And when you hold slide film up against the sky, the highlights can be almost shockingly bright.
I don’t think HDR quite matches slide film yet (partly because monitors just aren’t as bright as the sky), but it’s a huge step forward.
Do you think slide film "grossly distorts the composition" as well?
aCuria wrote:
You can benefit from the BT.2020 color volume without overemphasizing the highlights, how you edit your RAW file is completely up to you after all!
If you’ve used slide film, you’ll probably remember how dense and rich the colors are, with a kind of saturation and color richness that really punches way beyond what the best IPS displays have been able to reproduce.
And when you hold slide film up against the sky, the highlights can be almost shockingly bright.
I don’t think HDR quite matches slide film yet (partly because monitors just aren’t as bright as the sky), but it’s a huge step forward.
Do you think slide film "grossly distorts the composition" as well?...Show more →
Slides create a very different impression than HDR when properly displayed through projection. All of the colors are rich, bright and luminous, not only the highlights, so all the brightness values are balanced. In projection, the highlights are not HDR. Nor are the highlights of a slide HDR when they are printed or when displayed on a standard monitor.
I'd be interested (genuinely) to see some photos where you think that HDR has actually enhanced the image. The ones I have seen just look odd, distracting, and unnatural. Our eyes and brain don't see in HDR--the pupil closes down if something is too bright.
chiron wrote:
Slides create a very different impression than HDR when properly displayed through projection. All of the colors are rich, bright and luminous, not only the highlights, so all the brightness values are balanced. In projection, the highlights are not HDR. Nor are the highlights of a slide HDR when they are printed or when displayed on a standard monitor.
I'd be interested (genuinely) to see some photos where you think that HDR has actually enhanced the image. The ones I have seen just look odd, distracting, and unnatural. Our eyes and brain don't see in HDR--the pupil closes down if something is too bright.
I’ll have to find some website that hosts hdr images… Flickr doesn’t work
To give an obvious example, HDR certainly enhances front-lit subjects.
I notice HDR also considerably increases highlight detail compared to 8 bit SDR. White subjects are considerably enhanced.
In SDR, even when highlights aren’t technically clipped, they’re heavily compressed. So a wide range of bright values in the original scene gets squeezed into a narrow band near white. The detail is still there, but it’s impossible to distinguish.
chiron wrote:
I'd be interested (genuinely) to see some photos where you think that HDR has actually enhanced the image. The ones I have seen just look odd, distracting, and unnatural. Our eyes and brain don't see in HDR--the pupil closes down if something is too bright.
Yes, I think HDR is the future…eventually. Sadly it seems, at present, to be a too-far-off future. HDR has become standard presentation in movies, tv series, and video games, and the latest advances from Dolby Vision 2 and HDR10+ are exciting and show continued upward progress. But, the lack of support for HDR image files in online photography platforms is holding progress back for photographers.
It’s only been since October 2023 that Adobe added support for editing photos in HDR within Lightroom, but since I cannot yet post and present an HDR image on Flickr it renders the whole thing pointless for now.
I think that change is inevitable, but the pace of that change is so far glacially slow.
darbo wrote:
Yes, I think HDR is the future…eventually. Sadly it seems, at present, to be a too-far-off future. HDR has become standard presentation in movies, tv series, and video games, and the latest advances from Dolby Vision 2 and HDR10+ are exciting and show continued upward progress. But, the lack of support for HDR image files in online photography platforms is holding progress back for photographers.
It’s only been since October 2023 that Adobe added support for editing photos in HDR within Lightroom, but since I cannot yet post and present an HDR image on Flickr it renders the whole thing pointless for now.
I think that change is inevitable, but the pace of that change is so far glacially slow. ...Show more →
I found that zonerama does support HDR images, this can replace flickr for now.
The iPhone camera roll does support HDR images (Export JXL from lightroom)
I think the main problem is that there is a plethora of different displays with different capabilities (with regards to maximum brightness, dynamic range, and capabilities with regards to making local adjustments to these parameters) and while methods and algorithms for adjusting the data to match the display capabilities exist, at least some of them are patented and software and hardware to support this technology on the user's end probably needs to be licensed, which my guess is that many computer manufacturers and browser / app developers aren't going to do. I have a HDR TV which has support for Dolby Vision and many apps for streaming therefore can adjust the display to accommodate the content and optimize it. It also adjusts itself based on ambient illumination in some situations. I find it to be really good for watching video content. However, the photography monitor on my desktop is optimized for printing and graphics arts work and does not support HDR as such. My laptop has a HDR capable OLED display but for consistency of viewing I calibrated it in SDR mode to produce similar viewing experience to my desktop monitor for photography. My office monitor again is different but that I don't need to use for viewing photographs. I think software support for HDR still photography content is possible but for images displayed online, the browsers and file formats would then need to support a variety of monitors so that the images don't look weird on any user's device. I personally don't think still photography necessarily need a HDR viewing platform and I prefer consistency of viewing across printed and computer-displayed images. HDR displays likely consume more electricity than SDR as the extra light has to be produced somehow, and I am not really sure if the world needs more energy-hungry products.
ilkka_nissila wrote:
HDR displays likely consume more electricity than SDR as the extra light has to be produced somehow, and I am not really sure if the world needs more energy-hungry products.
The new tech consumes less power.
1) Traditional LCDs run a white backlight at full power.
2) 50% of the light is immediately thrown away (polarizer 1)
3) liquid crystals rotate polarization
4) rgb filters (2/3 of the remaining light is thrown away)
5) second polarizer throws away light that was rotated in step 2
At least 83% of the light is thrown away on the traditional LCD
For qd-oled:
1) for each subpixel blue oleds produces blue light. If the subpixel is darker the blue oled is dimmed.
2) Red quantum dot converts blue light to red for the red sub pixel
3) Green quantum dot converts blue light to green for the green sub pixel
That’s all there is to it. The quantum dots are 90% efficient or more.
I first paid attention to HDR when the X2D2 arrived. Next, when the new Apple Studio Monitor appeared.. the 2000nit one. Then I looked around for an HDR replacement for Flickr and as mentioned above, found Zonerama. Then I changed my workflow, but not to include Hasselblad JPEG HDR, but working from TIFF. My workflow goes through Phocus to generate TIFF. I do like what HDR can do for some images. I think this workflow makes sense when the target audience is using HDR screens.. and most of us are.. The issue is that two separate edits are needed, given that I also like to print. I suppose that software will get better at recompressing the image during the export process, but for now, the bottom line is that I’m accustomed to looking at non-HDR images and these are what looks ‘normal’ to me. I do think that years from now, HDR will be the ‘normal’ workflow’ and most will be generated by smartphones and images pulled off ultra-high resolution video.
You do need a HDR capable monitor to see it properly
I think the images themselves in terms of scene, composition, and the photographer's technique are excellent. But I think that the HDR does a real disservice to the fine photos, drawing the eyes to the edges of the waves and the feet of the figure in the stained-glass window. The HDR is a distraction from the overall composition and scene. It breaks the visual coherence of the image. I think the SDR versions are very sub-optimally processed and artificially flat looking and so are a misleading point of comparison. They would look much more appealing with better development and would, with better processing, be the only versions I would want to look at or buy. YMMV, of course.
aCuria wrote:
By this I mean using HDR-capable displays and full bit-rate images edited in the BT.2020 or DCI-P3 color space
My understanding is that HDR and expanded color spaces like DCI-P3 are different things.
Reproduction systems (screens and printers) cannot necessarily reproduce all possible colors. Some color spaces are more restricted in this regard (like sRGB) while others are more expansive (like P3). So this, as I understand it, isn’t exactly about HDR, or expanding dynamic range, but about expanding the range or represented colors. (Even that is perhaps less of a big deal than you might think, at least when it comes to final output.)
HDR is about the range of luminosity values that can be represented and reproduced, which is a different thing. The term also means different things to different people. Is it that images are displayed with a greater range between the lightest and darkest values? Or is it that image capture records a wider range of luminosity levels that can be used in post-processing to create an image less affected by blown highlights and/or compromised shadow detail?
And, of course, there is the application of the term to what many regard as a garish form of post-processing that was popular a few years ago but which, thankfully, seems to be running its course.
Display technology has always lagged the image quality captured by our cameras. I think internet connection speed and widely available content are required to push display technology. At 4k resolution we are getting to the point that adding more resolution does not provide for the most bang for the buck. It is logical to start increasing bit depth past 8 bit / channel. It seems based on current monitor technology 10 bit will be the next step, hopefully the formats that will be come common have the headroom to go beyond 10 bit seamlessly. One 10 bit is common, then that provides some room for commercial viability past 10 bit. On the resolution side I wonder if we pause at 6k before maybe an eventual move to 8k.
I know with the 4k displays I can finally get a sense of just how good 4mp pictures from 25 years ago actually are.
gdanmitchell wrote:
My understanding is that HDR and expanded color spaces like DCI-P3 are different things.
Reproduction systems (screens and printers) cannot necessarily reproduce all possible colors. Some color spaces are more restricted in this regard (like sRGB) while others are more expansive (like P3). So this, as I understand it, isn’t exactly about HDR, or expanding dynamic range, but about expanding the range or represented colors. (Even that is perhaps less of a big deal than you might think, at least when it comes to final output.)
HDR is about the range of luminosity values that can be represented and reproduced, which is a different thing. The term also means different things to different people. Is it that images are displayed with a greater range between the lightest and darkest values? Or is it that image capture records a wider range of luminosity levels that can be used in post-processing to create an image less affected by blown highlights and/or compromised shadow detail?
And, of course, there is the application of the term to what many regard as a garish form of post-processing that was popular a few years ago but which, thankfully, seems to be running its course....Show more →
I think you’re right on the technical level. However HDR display devices are typically 10-bit, so the massive expansion of displayable colors may as well be inclusive of the term HDR on an inexact practical level.
This kind of reminds me of the audio world where people keep claiming surround sound or atmos are the future of how we listen to music. Until the technology gets to point where even the cheapest and most widely accessible devices support that kind of playback, the industry will never shift that hard. Bit of a chicken and egg problem really.
One of the issues with increasing display dynamic range — which surely can be done — is that at some point you just push the far edges of the dynamic range into places that are not particularly useful.
It is a different thing to record a larger dynamic range with decent accuracy, since that allows us to do things in post to recover very dark luminosity levels that previously would have been lost in a bunch of noise. That is really useful.
But playing back that full range doesn’t have much benefit for most of us.
Expanding the number of colors that can be represented digitally has some value in edge cases, particularly early in the editing process.
If I can make another analogy, it is a lot like digital audio. You can have extremely high sampling rates in recording systems these days, rates that far exceed the half-sampling-rate frequencies that can be heard by humans. In a sophisticated audio post-processing environment, that arguably allows some tiny inaccuracies to creep in as signals are mixed and processed but without affecting the final audio output in ways that we can hear.
But using those sampling rates for playback systems doesn’t make any sense. The place where the difference takes place is beyond the limits of human hearing.
Back to the fundamentals, I feel like a lot of this stuff, at least at the playback/display level s sort of the latest fad. We’ve had plenty of them in the audio world, and it isn’t a surprise that we’ll have them with visual systems.
The higher spec standards are good to have and useful for very critical high end stuff, but they aren’t going to change the end-user’s experience all that much if at all.
I used to think that computers and technology in general will "unlock" new creative frontiers. The new forms of artistic expression through photography will be born, available exclusively on digital medium.
But it's not happening. The currently popular 14-bit RAW editing paired with the common wide gamut displays is already vastly more capable than a negative + darkroom print with all the tricks like preflashing, dodging, burning, and masking. And yet, the fundamentals of a good image are still the same. I don't think I've ever seen an image that works digitally but doesn't work as a print.
All this tech "unlocked" exactly nothing, the only need it served was the need for convenience: auto-metering, auto-focusing, auto-developing, and now with computational photography - auto RAW editing and auto-framing. Less work. Same output.
So I no longer hold that belief. HDR changes nothing. Just a new distraction from the fundamentals. But to answer the OPs question, yes it will be popular/default on every single smartphone. Because why not.
old-gregg wrote:
I used to think that computers and technology in general will "unlock" new creative frontiers. The new forms of artistic expression through photography will be born, available exclusively on digital medium.
But it's not happening. The currently popular 14-bit RAW editing paired with the common wide gamut displays is already vastly more capable than a negative + darkroom print with all the tricks like preflashing, dodging, burning, and masking. And yet, the fundamentals of a good image are still the same. I don't think I've ever seen an image that works digitally but doesn't work as a print.
All this tech "unlocked" exactly nothing, the only need it served was the need for convenience: auto-metering, auto-focusing, auto-developing, and now with computational photography - auto RAW editing and auto-framing. Less work. Same output.
So I no longer hold that belief. HDR changes nothing. Just a new distraction from the fundamentals. But to answer the OPs question, yes it will be popular/default on every single smartphone. Because why not....Show more →
How did you envision technology unlocking new creative frontiers in photography?
