Re: Utility of dynamic range beyond a certain point
Painters — at least old-school painters — do something similar to what our visual system does, though it a slightly different way. (And photographic printers do this same thing.)
When we look at a scene with a huge dynamic range our eyes adjust to accommodate the focus of our attention. When we send our attention to something darker the pupils open ad the whole scene lightens, though we don’t really typically register that change. The opposite happens when our gaze goes to a very bright area — our pupils contract and the entire scene darkens.
Painters and photographers actually don’t want to nor do they need to produce prints/paintings with the full real world dynamic range. In fact, we typically lighten the dark areas of the painting/print and darken the lightest areas so that when one takes in the full image there is little need to visually adjust.
You can do an experiment to see how this works. Some evening, perhaps around early twilight, look at a scene with a nearby division between something dark — the near side of a building, silhouetted trees, etc — and something very bright such as a section of the sky. Look at the dark areas for a moment and you’ll see details in those shadows. Now move your gaze to the sky and pay careful attention to what happens — a fraction of a second later the sky will visibly darken.
sbay wrote: chiron wrote:
Yet, obviously, many paintings are spectacularly beautiful without doing anything like HDR and with a more limited dynamic and contrast range. That might teach us something about how much dynamic range we actually need to make a beautiful photograph.
When you say dynamic range, are you talking about the dynamic range of the painting itself? or the scene that the painter captured?
A plein air painter will paint an outdoor scene and have to deal with the exact same dynamic range challenges that a photographer would have to handle. Except the painter relies on their eyes to "capture" the information in the scene and then translate it to the more limited dynamic range of the canvas. A photographer would have to rely on the sensor to do the same, and then during editing map it to the more limited dynamic range of the monitor, or paper.
For paper, people normally talk about contrast range. A matt paper might have a contrast ratio (darkest black to brightest white) of 100:1 and a glossy paper might have a ratio of 200:1. I guess that's roughly to 7 to 8 stops.
I suspect paintings have greater contrast ratio than prints because they can use a wider variety of pigments. Apparently there are specialty paints, like Vanta Black, that can absorb 99.965% of light. I think that works out to a 3000:1 contrast ratio (11.5 stops). But even using something like Vanta Black, they are still mapping the scene they see with their eyes (maybe 15stops?) into the much reduced range of the canvas and paint. So I guess you could say they are still doing "HDR" except manually.
Jun 10, 2026 at 10:33 AM
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