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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Real-time HDR is great! Hope everyone gets in that bandwagon.

At some point HDR processing should become part of the hardware pipeline in every sensor, and we'll simply have a selectable dynamic range.

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You made my postmodern sense tingle!

I have noticed more and more cameras implementing automatic color correction resulting in orange people and color changes while filming the same scene. I think HDR looks unnatural.

HDR can look as natural as you want. You're probably thinking of burnt-out crazy over-saturated flickr shots like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yury-prokopenko/3561920871/ligh...

Or this (beyond terrible):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nik-on/4624961812/

But that's the photographer's fault. HDR is just a way of compensating for lack of dynamic range in a sensor. Used correctly it should make the image more real, not less, by bringing it closer to the human eye's full dynamic range. Examples:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/margall69/7496881548/lightbox/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankspecht/4954970921/lightbox... (snow and sky would be completely blown out without HDR)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelgcumming/4525129653/ligh...

Although I completely agree with your point - that HDR is a tool, and can be used for both high and low quality shots - I actually really like the second example you gave for what "bad" HDR looks like. It seemed like an artistic use with a rather gorgeous result to me. Your main point stands, though.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a photographer, and the only thing I know about photography is what I learned in college computer vision courses and overheard from friends.)

I'm actually a photographer and I like the over-the-top HDR shots (even the example linked). It really depends on personal taste, and what it is you're after.

A lot of people dismiss them because they're "unrealistic" (which they obviously are) but I ask you is an oil painting unrealistic? For example this:

http://snapzlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Oil-Painting...

Clearly that is a painting, but if exactly the same picture was acquired using HDR everyone would dismiss it as being terrible?

My point is that you can use HDR to get realistic looking pictures, but you can also use HDR for "artistic" reasons, like painting using your camera. A lot of photographers are dismissive of the latter because they want to pretend photography is a practical rather than artistic endeavour.

wouldn't most people also think that was a pretty bad painting?

Not if you live in Wisconsin.

HDR can look natural when used correctly, but if the camera's doing it automatically I bet we'll start to see lots of casual photographs abusing it.

Sony's Exmor RS sensor already has hardware HDR, and can take HDR videos in real time. They should ship with many of the high-end smartphones this year.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/20/Sony-Stacked-CMOS-se...

I just want higher dynamic range screens.

here's a really good blog post on the topic http://19lights.com/wp/2011/11/14/will-hdr-displays-really-w...

Too bad the explanation of how it works was indistinguishable from technobabble.

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