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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that the point of the article? That the colloquial meaning of HDR is quite overloaded, and when people complain about HDR, they mean bad tone-mapping? I say this as someone as close to totally ignorant about photography as you can get; I personally thought the article was pretty spectacular.

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When I complain about HDR it's because I've intentionally set the brightness of pure white to a comfortable level, and then suddenly parts of my screen are brighter than that. You fundamentally can't solve that problem with just better tone mapping, can you?

You can for some definition of "solve", by tone-mapping all HDR content back down into an SDR range for display.

Well yeah. I considered adding that caveat but elected not to because it's obvious and doesn't add anything to the conversation, since that's obviously not what's meant when the industry talks about "HDR". Should've remembered this is HN.

The bit about "confused" turns me off right away. The kind of high-pressure stereo salesman who hopes I am the kind of 'audiophile' who prevents me from calling myself an 'audiophile' (wants mercury-filled cables for a more 'fluid' sound) always presupposes the reader/listener is "confused".

But it's not the colloquial meaning, HDR is fairly well defined by e.g. ITU-R BT.2100, which addresses colorimetry, luminance and the corresponding transfer functions.

I don't think that's the colloquial meaning. If you asked 100 people on the street to describe HDR, I doubt a single person would bring up ITU-R BT.2100.

HDR has a number of different common meanings, which adds to the confusion.

For example, in video games, "HDR" has been around since the mid '00s, and refers to games that render a wider dynamic range than displays were capable of, and use post-process effects to simulate artifcats like bloom and pupil dilation.

In photography, HDR has almost the opposite meaning of what it does everywhere else. Long and multiple exposures are combined to create an image that has very little contrast, bringing out detail in a shot that would normally be lost in shadows or to overexposure.

Photography’s meaning is also about a hundred years older than video games; high(er) dynamic range was a concern in film processing as far back as Ansel, if not prior. That technology adopted it as a sales keyword is interesting and it’s worth keeping in mind when writing for an audience — but this post is about a photography app, not television content or video games, so one can reasonably expect photography’s definition to be used, even if the audience isn’t necessarily familiar.

I think you may be operating with an idiosyncratic definition of "colloquial"

Colloquial meaning and the well defined meaning are two different things in most cases, right?

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