Editing for SDR and HDR output

• Less post-processing is needed (less masking and less fighting the highlights)
• The washed-out highlights have better color and better detail.
• The greyish sky of SDR gets its blues back in HDR .
• The colors in SDR are muted and require lots of work to make them pop.

DMillier said:

"So what's this HDR about?", I thought. So I looked at my monitor and noticed it has this badge on it that says "HDR". I picked up the remote control - yes, my monitor has a remote control to operate its functions instead of those ludicrous fiddly buttons hidden underneath that so many have. I scrolled through the onscreen menus and found an option under the colour submenu called HDR. I enabled it. Immediately my screen went 10x brighter and vapourised my retinas. I soldiered on and examined the sample image. My first thought looking at the images was "these are hideously bright". My second thought was the "second image of each pair appears to be grossly oversaturated and psychedelic".

My conclusion was that this new HDR function is nothing about capturing and recording data from high subject brightness range subjects ie extending the dynamic range of the capture device. Instead it is about extending brightness range of the output display device.

I think Ansel Adams proved the point that is not a desirable goal. The absolute dynamic range of the output device is essentially irrelevant - what is important is the tonal relationships present in whatever dynamic range your output device has. If you get those tonal relationships correct, it fools the brain into perceiving a much more brilliant and wide ranging image. Your perception manufacturers a convincing impression of the brilliance of the image. You don't need a 1:10,000 output range to convincingly portray the 1:10,000 range in the original scene. A 1:50 matte print can do it very well as long as the tonal range of the print is carefully chosen to trick the brain into recreating an impression of the original scene.

Now given that what I hate about all monitors is that the brighter half of the display range is far too bright in relation to the darker half resulting in a searing, painful, fatiguing experience (when I worked in an office, I sometimes wore sunglasses to avoid eyestrain and headaches from screen working); when viewing images with extensive highlight regions, the absolutely last thing I want is a mode that makes my backlight 10x brighter. I turned off the HDR function ASAP and went back to viewing a very carefully dimmed-down-as-far-it-can-be screen with images portrayed as gently and inoffensively as is possible by a harsh backlit transmissive device such as a screen. The ideal screen for me would be an e-Ink E-reader lit by reflected light only.

Click to expand...

SrMi said:

This post is about HDR output, as discussed here, not HDR merge, which involves merging several images into one.

Editing and sharing HDR output images is still in its infancy and is barely supported across various sharing tools.

I am sharing two images in two versions: one edited for SDR and one edited for HDR:

Zonerama HDR vs. SDR Album

If you have an HDR monitor (at least 1000 nits) and a browser that supports HDR, you will notice its advantages. HDR output is not about garish images that burn your retina but fine improvements that boost the joy of looking at a recorded scene.

The advantages of HDR

• Less post-processing is needed (less masking and less fighting the highlights)
• The washed-out highlights have better color and better detail.
• The greyish sky of SDR gets its blues back in HDR .
• The colors in SDR are muted and require lots of work to make them pop.

The disadvantage of HDR output is the lack of support, but it is being worked on. Ideally, a single image file should contain both SDR and HDR versions, but I have not managed to do that yet.

Once mature, I believe HDR output will supersede SDR as the choice of display output format. I agree with Eric Chan: “A well-made print is a thing of beauty: a physical, tactile representation of a photograph that stands on its own.” However, an HDR output image shown on a proper display will be a serious alternative to print and not just a convenience.

Click to expand...

Danonano said:

I appreciate seeing this post! HDR is likely the most common format in photography when you consider that most modern phones are shooting in HDR by default.

I share photos with family in friends via Google Photos. Anyone with recent phone, or a Mac laptop or Ipad views them in HDR without even knowing it.

I've started editing my mirrorless photos in HDR in Lightroom when it's appropriate to the image, and then share them via Google Photos. Lightroom has made it so easy. I just have to be careful when I export to remember if I'm exporting in HDR or SRGB.

The serious photography community seems very slow to embrace HDR, but for some photos its great since it gives more room for the highlights, as you mentioned.

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

Danonano said:

I appreciate seeing this post! HDR is likely the most common format in photography when you consider that most modern phones are shooting in HDR by default.

I share photos with family in friends via Google Photos. Anyone with recent phone, or a Mac laptop or Ipad views them in HDR without even knowing it.

I've started editing my mirrorless photos in HDR in Lightroom when it's appropriate to the image, and then share them via Google Photos. Lightroom has made it so easy. I just have to be careful when I export to remember if I'm exporting in HDR or SRGB.

The serious photography community seems very slow to embrace HDR, but for some photos its great since it gives more room for the highlights, as you mentioned.

Click to expand...

Is this the same HDR you are talking about?

HDR for me is all about the capture device. With a typical sensor, if the subject brightness range exceeds the dynamic range of the sensor, to avoid clipping the highlights you have to reduce the exposure. This causes the shadow regions to be underexposed and dark. If you later raise the levels of the shadows in post, you expose ugly noise and banding.

One way to solve this problem is some form of exposure blending whereby you shoot at least one image carefully overexposed to ensure the shadows get adequate light, and one image underexposed to ensure the highlights are not clipped. You then blend those images in post so that your final image consists of a mix of the overexposed shadows and the underexposed highlights. This gives no highlight clipping, no shadow noise and the maximum detail across the range and lots of scope for editing the image to taste. I believe something like this is essentially what smartphones do in an automated way, and this is what I think of when I hear the term "HDR".

SrMi appears to be talking about something different, a hardware thing I'm not familiar with that has to do with something built into certain display monitors. From his description, it appears to rely on using a much brighter backlight. I'm not entirely sure what this achieves, other than perhaps making the shadows lighter so you can see detail in the shadows that would normally be lost in darkness.

I'm sure there must be more to it than this, perhaps SrMi could explain the background more thoroughly, including details of the gear you need to make this work, and how you prepare and view your HDR images before we try and understand what benefits it brings, and test out the sample images? At the moment I have no real idea what I'm looking at, except that it is not a pleasant experience.

Click to expand...

darinb said:

One additional thought--

In my mind, this technology marks the divergence of paper-based images and screen-based images.

In the past, especially in these parts, screen-based images were considered secondary to print-based images, even though only a small number of photographers made prints of their images.

But you can see the point--the screen image looked more or less like the print image and so one was just a version of the other.

With HDR the screen image is no longer a version of the paper image, it looks and feels like something altogether different...at least for some images. Of course, images with limited tonal range will look identical in SDR and HDR, only if the images go beyond the SDR tonal range will there be any difference. But when there is a difference that difference can be extraordinary.

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

BenQ 4k 32".

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

darinb said:

One additional thought--

In my mind, this technology marks the divergence of paper-based images and screen-based images.

In the past, especially in these parts, screen-based images were considered secondary to print-based images, even though only a small number of photographers made prints of their images.

But you can see the point--the screen image looked more or less like the print image and so one was just a version of the other.

With HDR the screen image is no longer a version of the paper image, it looks and feels like something altogether different...at least for some images. Of course, images with limited tonal range will look identical in SDR and HDR, only if the images go beyond the SDR tonal range will there be any difference. But when there is a difference that difference can be extraordinary.

Click to expand...

The use of language is important here, otherwise confusion sets in.

Subject brightness range = the brightness range in the original scene from dark to light expressed as a ratio. On a dull overcast day this can be very low, about 1:20. On a bright, harshly lit scene with deep shadow it can be very high, as much as 1:20,000.

Sensor/film exposure range (also commonly called sensor dynamic range) = The range between the highlight clipping point and the darkest recorded shadow in the raw file/negative. There are different ways of measuring this depending on how tolerant you are of shadow noise. DXO for example, uses what it calls Engineering dynamic range which includes a lot more noise than is useful for photographic purposes, which is why they can rate modern sensors at around 15 stops of dynamic range (about 1:30,000). Photons to photos uses a less noisy range they call Photographic dynamic range which rates modern sensors at around 11 - 12 stops of PDR (1:2000, if I have added up on my fingers correctly).

Output medium reflectance (print) or transmission contrast range (screen) = the measured difference in brightness of the paper base to the darkest tone the print can produce (dMax). Screen contrast is measured in some way I don't understand. A typical matte finish printing paper or darkroom wet print has a reflectance range of about 1:50. A high gloss print about 1:200.

I presume that these HDR monitors we are discussing have a contrast range that far exceeds the normal contrast range of typical everyday monitors and what is being discussed here is the benefits of using a screen that is capable of much higher contrast than traditional screens?

I'm unsure what the photographic benefits of this are, as Ansel Adams proved 1:50 or less is perfectly capable of producing a fully plausible image of a very high subject brightness range, if skillfully produced. The trick is to present a tonal range that the eye/brain can expand to the perception of a full range. It's all about exactly how the brightnesses of the original scene are compressed in a non linear fashion to create a tonality that tricks the brain into perceiving a full range of tones that aren't actually present in the output medium.You don't actually need an output device with a huge contrast range to do this. if you see an Ansel print, they seem somehow to glow with an imaginary inner light. It's a trick exploiting the human visual system but it works given sufficient skill. Using an output device with a huge contrast range seems to me to not only be unnecessary but akin to smashing yourself in the face with a sledgehammer to achieve the effect of seeing stars...

Click to expand...

darinb said:

DMillier said:

Danonano said:

I appreciate seeing this post! HDR is likely the most common format in photography when you consider that most modern phones are shooting in HDR by default.

I share photos with family in friends via Google Photos. Anyone with recent phone, or a Mac laptop or Ipad views them in HDR without even knowing it.

I've started editing my mirrorless photos in HDR in Lightroom when it's appropriate to the image, and then share them via Google Photos. Lightroom has made it so easy. I just have to be careful when I export to remember if I'm exporting in HDR or SRGB.

The serious photography community seems very slow to embrace HDR, but for some photos its great since it gives more room for the highlights, as you mentioned.

Click to expand...

Is this the same HDR you are talking about?

HDR for me is all about the capture device. With a typical sensor, if the subject brightness range exceeds the dynamic range of the sensor, to avoid clipping the highlights you have to reduce the exposure. This causes the shadow regions to be underexposed and dark. If you later raise the levels of the shadows in post, you expose ugly noise and banding.

One way to solve this problem is some form of exposure blending whereby you shoot at least one image carefully overexposed to ensure the shadows get adequate light, and one image underexposed to ensure the highlights are not clipped. You then blend those images in post so that your final image consists of a mix of the overexposed shadows and the underexposed highlights. This gives no highlight clipping, no shadow noise and the maximum detail across the range and lots of scope for editing the image to taste. I believe something like this is essentially what smartphones do in an automated way, and this is what I think of when I hear the term "HDR".

SrMi appears to be talking about something different, a hardware thing I'm not familiar with that has to do with something built into certain display monitors. From his description, it appears to rely on using a much brighter backlight. I'm not entirely sure what this achieves, other than perhaps making the shadows lighter so you can see detail in the shadows that would normally be lost in darkness.

I'm sure there must be more to it than this, perhaps SrMi could explain the background more thoroughly, including details of the gear you need to make this work, and how you prepare and view your HDR images before we try and understand what benefits it brings, and test out the sample images? At the moment I have no real idea what I'm looking at, except that it is not a pleasant experience.

Click to expand...

See the links I posted to the video from Apple and from photographer Greg Benz: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/67846616

Click to expand...

darinb said:

The HDR you describe is the "old" HDR--where you are trying to shrink a scene's brightness range to that of your screen (or your print). That is not this.

Click to expand...

darinb said:

This "new" HDR starts with the idea that the screen you are probably looking at can display a much greater range of brightness than the older screens--a higher dynamic range, in so many words. At the same time, your RAW files have a much greater tonal range than can be displayed on the old screens, and so displaying them on old screens requires some sort of compression of their native tonal range. (Not a technical description!)

Click to expand...

darinb said:

If a screen can display a high dynamic range and a RAW file has a high dynamic range--what's missing? The editing software and, in general, agreed upon standards for displaying these high dynamic range images. Enter Adobe, last fall, who updated Photoshop and Lightroom to display HDR stills. Enter Apple who updated Photos some time ago to display HDR stills (quite logically since the iPhone for, like, the past four versions, has been shooting HDR stills).

Click to expand...

darinb said:

Enter Google which updated Chrome recently to display HDR stills. Enter Apple again which will, after it gets out of Beta, support HDR stills in the new OS, including Safari and Messages.

To be clear, this "new" HDR is not the one you heard about before last year, where you merged multiple photos. Forget about that.

Also, this is not about making every pixel brighter and thus lightening the shadows. This is about taking advantage of the very high dynamic range of modern monitors and home screens for still photography (video has had HDR for forever now--still photography is at last catching up).

Click to expand...

darinb said:

You cannot print HDR images without greatly shrinking their dynamic range since paper cannot really be made brighter to capture that extra four stops of brightness available with HDR stills. HDR is only for screen display.

Click to expand...

darinb said:

You don't need a new camera since all of your RAW photos, going back to the beginning, will be able to take advantage of this extra brightness (assuming it works aesthetically for the image!) All of your iPhone stills are already HDR--when you look at a photo on your phone and it pauses for a half second and then sort of brightens/glows? That's the HDR kicking in.

Click to expand...

darinb said:

The new HDR takes a minute to get your head around but very worth it--check out the Apple video especially (the first half). It lays it all out very clearly.

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

Danonano said:

I appreciate seeing this post! HDR is likely the most common format in photography when you consider that most modern phones are shooting in HDR by default.

I share photos with family in friends via Google Photos. Anyone with recent phone, or a Mac laptop or Ipad views them in HDR without even knowing it.

I've started editing my mirrorless photos in HDR in Lightroom when it's appropriate to the image, and then share them via Google Photos. Lightroom has made it so easy. I just have to be careful when I export to remember if I'm exporting in HDR or SRGB.

The serious photography community seems very slow to embrace HDR, but for some photos its great since it gives more room for the highlights, as you mentioned.

Click to expand...

Is this the same HDR you are talking about?

HDR for me is all about the capture device. With a typical sensor, if the subject brightness range exceeds the dynamic range of the sensor, to avoid clipping the highlights you have to reduce the exposure. This causes the shadow regions to be underexposed and dark. If you later raise the levels of the shadows in post, you expose ugly noise and banding.

One way to solve this problem is some form of exposure blending whereby you shoot at least one image carefully overexposed to ensure the shadows get adequate light, and one image underexposed to ensure the highlights are not clipped. You then blend those images in post so that your final image consists of a mix of the overexposed shadows and the underexposed highlights. This gives no highlight clipping, no shadow noise and the maximum detail across the range and lots of scope for editing the image to taste. I believe something like this is essentially what smartphones do in an automated way, and this is what I think of when I hear the term "HDR".

Click to expand...

DavidMillier said:

SrMi appears to be talking about something different, a hardware thing I'm not familiar with that has to do with something built into certain display monitors. From his description, it appears to rely on using a much brighter backlight. I'm not entirely sure what this achieves, other than perhaps making the shadows lighter so you can see detail in the shadows that would normally be lost in darkness.

I'm sure there must be more to it than this, perhaps SrMi could explain the background more thoroughly, including details of the gear you need to make this work, and how you prepare and view your HDR images before we try and understand what benefits it brings, and test out the sample images? At the moment I have no real idea what I'm looking at, except that it is not a pleasant experience.

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

darinb said:

DMillier said:

Danonano said:

I appreciate seeing this post! HDR is likely the most common format in photography when you consider that most modern phones are shooting in HDR by default.

I share photos with family in friends via Google Photos. Anyone with recent phone, or a Mac laptop or Ipad views them in HDR without even knowing it.

I've started editing my mirrorless photos in HDR in Lightroom when it's appropriate to the image, and then share them via Google Photos. Lightroom has made it so easy. I just have to be careful when I export to remember if I'm exporting in HDR or SRGB.

The serious photography community seems very slow to embrace HDR, but for some photos its great since it gives more room for the highlights, as you mentioned.

Click to expand...

Is this the same HDR you are talking about?

HDR for me is all about the capture device. With a typical sensor, if the subject brightness range exceeds the dynamic range of the sensor, to avoid clipping the highlights you have to reduce the exposure. This causes the shadow regions to be underexposed and dark. If you later raise the levels of the shadows in post, you expose ugly noise and banding.

One way to solve this problem is some form of exposure blending whereby you shoot at least one image carefully overexposed to ensure the shadows get adequate light, and one image underexposed to ensure the highlights are not clipped. You then blend those images in post so that your final image consists of a mix of the overexposed shadows and the underexposed highlights. This gives no highlight clipping, no shadow noise and the maximum detail across the range and lots of scope for editing the image to taste. I believe something like this is essentially what smartphones do in an automated way, and this is what I think of when I hear the term "HDR".

SrMi appears to be talking about something different, a hardware thing I'm not familiar with that has to do with something built into certain display monitors. From his description, it appears to rely on using a much brighter backlight. I'm not entirely sure what this achieves, other than perhaps making the shadows lighter so you can see detail in the shadows that would normally be lost in darkness.

I'm sure there must be more to it than this, perhaps SrMi could explain the background more thoroughly, including details of the gear you need to make this work, and how you prepare and view your HDR images before we try and understand what benefits it brings, and test out the sample images? At the moment I have no real idea what I'm looking at, except that it is not a pleasant experience.

Click to expand...

See the links I posted to the video from Apple and from photographer Greg Benz: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/67846616

Click to expand...

I will look at this.

DavidMillier said:

The HDR you describe is the "old" HDR--where you are trying to shrink a scene's brightness range to that of your screen (or your print). That is not this.

Click to expand...

You cannot have any kind of true output HDR unless you have already captured the data from a high subject brightness range scene. Although, you can of course, expand a narrow subject brightness range to a greater output contrast range in post. We sometimes do this when we drag the ends of the histogram left and right to add contrast to a flat capture to add punch.

DavidMillier said:

This "new" HDR starts with the idea that the screen you are probably looking at can display a much greater range of brightness than the older screens--a higher dynamic range, in so many words. At the same time, your RAW files have a much greater tonal range than can be displayed on the old screens, and so displaying them on old screens requires some sort of compression of their native tonal range. (Not a technical description!)

Click to expand...

I'd argue (as Ansel Adams did) that the absolute dynamic range of your output device doesn't matter at all. He said that old daguerrotypes he measured with his reflectance densitometer as having a reflectance range as low as 1:10 were more than capable of displaying perfectly plausible images of extremely high subject brightness range scenes. The trick is in the way you organise the non-linear compression of the tones. Do it right and it fools the eye into perceiving a much higher contrast range. The heavy lifting is done by the brain and how it interprets the tonality. Technically it is all about exactly how the negative/raw file tones are mapped to the output medium. Hence his invention of the zone system and sophisticated film development methods.

DavidMillier said:

If a screen can display a high dynamic range and a RAW file has a high dynamic range--what's missing? The editing software and, in general, agreed upon standards for displaying these high dynamic range images. Enter Adobe, last fall, who updated Photoshop and Lightroom to display HDR stills. Enter Apple who updated Photos some time ago to display HDR stills (quite logically since the iPhone for, like, the past four versions, has been shooting HDR stills).

Click to expand...

Sadly, I do not have an iPhone, nor do I use LR any more except for printing (ver 6.14 perceptual), nor do I use Chrome, nor do I use Apple OS.

DavidMillier said:

Enter Google which updated Chrome recently to display HDR stills. Enter Apple again which will, after it gets out of Beta, support HDR stills in the new OS, including Safari and Messages.

To be clear, this "new" HDR is not the one you heard about before last year, where you merged multiple photos. Forget about that.

Also, this is not about making every pixel brighter and thus lightening the shadows. This is about taking advantage of the very high dynamic range of modern monitors and home screens for still photography (video has had HDR for forever now--still photography is at last catching up).

Click to expand...

My monitor does have an HDR badge on it but my brief experiment of switching it from SDR to HDR mode resulted in a massive increase in the brightness of the backlight, exactly the opposite effect to how I carefully set up my monitor to as dim as possible. If this backlight boost is necessary for HDR, it's definitely not for me.

DavidMillier said:

You cannot print HDR images without greatly shrinking their dynamic range since paper cannot really be made brighter to capture that extra four stops of brightness available with HDR stills. HDR is only for screen display.

Click to expand...

This is missing the point, as Ansel explained. You don't need to high dynamic range output device to perceive high dynamic range, you just need appropriate tone mapping to fool the brain into internally creating the HDR perception.

DavidMillier said:

You don't need a new camera since all of your RAW photos, going back to the beginning, will be able to take advantage of this extra brightness (assuming it works aesthetically for the image!) All of your iPhone stills are already HDR--when you look at a photo on your phone and it pauses for a half second and then sort of brightens/glows? That's the HDR kicking in.

Click to expand...

It sounds to me to be akin to turning the volume up to 11 in a bid to improve sound fidelity. You certainly get an instant rush, but it doesn't actually improve fidelity.

Click to expand...

DavidMillier said:

DavidMillier said:

The new HDR takes a minute to get your head around but very worth it--check out the Apple video especially (the first half). It lays it all out very clearly.

Click to expand...

I will, I like to understand new stuff even if I don't end up using it.

Click to expand...

SrMi said:

DMillier said:

BenQ 4k 32".

Click to expand...

Do you know how many nits are supported? Are you using Windows or Mac? Linux does not seem to support HDR output mode yet.

Click to expand...

darinb said:

DMillier said:

darinb said:

One additional thought--

In my mind, this technology marks the divergence of paper-based images and screen-based images.

In the past, especially in these parts, screen-based images were considered secondary to print-based images, even though only a small number of photographers made prints of their images.

But you can see the point--the screen image looked more or less like the print image and so one was just a version of the other.

With HDR the screen image is no longer a version of the paper image, it looks and feels like something altogether different...at least for some images. Of course, images with limited tonal range will look identical in SDR and HDR, only if the images go beyond the SDR tonal range will there be any difference. But when there is a difference that difference can be extraordinary.

Click to expand...

The use of language is important here, otherwise confusion sets in.

Subject brightness range = the brightness range in the original scene from dark to light expressed as a ratio. On a dull overcast day this can be very low, about 1:20. On a bright, harshly lit scene with deep shadow it can be very high, as much as 1:20,000.

Sensor/film exposure range (also commonly called sensor dynamic range) = The range between the highlight clipping point and the darkest recorded shadow in the raw file/negative. There are different ways of measuring this depending on how tolerant you are of shadow noise. DXO for example, uses what it calls Engineering dynamic range which includes a lot more noise than is useful for photographic purposes, which is why they can rate modern sensors at around 15 stops of dynamic range (about 1:30,000). Photons to photos uses a less noisy range they call Photographic dynamic range which rates modern sensors at around 11 - 12 stops of PDR (1:2000, if I have added up on my fingers correctly).

Output medium reflectance (print) or transmission contrast range (screen) = the measured difference in brightness of the paper base to the darkest tone the print can produce (dMax). Screen contrast is measured in some way I don't understand. A typical matte finish printing paper or darkroom wet print has a reflectance range of about 1:50. A high gloss print about 1:200.

I presume that these HDR monitors we are discussing have a contrast range that far exceeds the normal contrast range of typical everyday monitors and what is being discussed here is the benefits of using a screen that is capable of much higher contrast than traditional screens?

I'm unsure what the photographic benefits of this are, as Ansel Adams proved 1:50 or less is perfectly capable of producing a fully plausible image of a very high subject brightness range, if skillfully produced. The trick is to present a tonal range that the eye/brain can expand to the perception of a full range. It's all about exactly how the brightnesses of the original scene are compressed in a non linear fashion to create a tonality that tricks the brain into perceiving a full range of tones that aren't actually present in the output medium.You don't actually need an output device with a huge contrast range to do this. if you see an Ansel print, they seem somehow to glow with an imaginary inner light. It's a trick exploiting the human visual system but it works given sufficient skill. Using an output device with a huge contrast range seems to me to not only be unnecessary but akin to smashing yourself in the face with a sledgehammer to achieve the effect of seeing stars...

Click to expand...

You mentioned you are a DXO user…here is an article from them on the topic (I think DXO now supports HDR stills?):

https://www.dxomark.com/dxomark-decodes-understanding-hdr-imaging/

—Darin

Click to expand...