> It's about HDR from the perspective of still photography, in your app, on iOS, in the context of hand-held mobile devices.

It's from the perspective of still photography, video, film, desktop computing, decades of research papers, and hundreds of years of analog photography, condensed into something approachable.

> However in the much broader context of HN, a highly technical community whose interests in imaging are diverse, the article's content level and narrow focus aren't consistent with the headline title. It seems written at a level appropriate for novice users.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"

To be clear, I didn't submit the post, and I never submit my posts. I don't care if my posts make a splash here, and kind of dread when they do because anything involving photography or video attracts the most annoying "well actually" guys on the Internet.

> When I saw the post's headline I thought "Cool! We really need a good technical deep dive into the mess that is HDR - including tech, specs, standards, formats, content acquisition, distribution and display across content types including stills, video clips and cinematic story-telling and diverse viewing contexts from phones to TVs to cinemas to VR."

The post is called, "What is HDR," and the introduction explains the intended audience. That audience is much larger than "people who want to read about ITU-R Recommendation BT.2100." But if you think people are interested in a post like that, by all means write it.

This post is written for people who have heard "HDR" and feel confused. That introduction lists two types of HDR people might think about. "The first" means "the first of two types we're going to explain," not "the first research in the chronological history of HDR."

> Hehe outside is “HDR content”? To me that still comes off as confused about what HDR is.

"Surprisingly, daytime shots with high dynamic range may also suffer from lack of light."

That's from, "Burst photography for high dynamic range and low-light imaging on mobile cameras," written by some of the most respected researchers in computational photography. It has 342 citations according to ACM.

I'm still waiting for a link to your papers.

> Tone mapping doesn’t imply HDR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping

First sentence: "Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map one set of colors to another to approximate the appearance of high-dynamic-range (HDR) images in a medium that has a more limited dynamic range."

> Why did you make the incorrect and obviously silly assumption that I was suggesting a camera’s aperture changes the outdoor scene’s dynamic range rather than what I actually said, that it changes the exposure?

Because you keep bumbling details like someone with a surface level understanding. Your replies are irrelevant, outdated, or flat out wrong. It all gives me flashbacks to working under engineers-turned-managers who just can't let go, forcing their irrelevant backgrounds into discussions.

It's cool that you studied late 90s 3D rendering. So did I. It doesn't make you an expert in computational photography. Please stop confusing people with your non-sequiturs.

You opened this thread arguing that Ansel Adams didn't "use HDR." I linked you to a seminal research paper which argues that he tone mapped HDR content, and goes on to implement a tone mapper based on his approach. This all seems open and shut.

> I’m happy to rescind my critique about Ansel Adams

Great, I'm done.

> and switch instead to pointing out that “HDR” doesn’t refer to the range of the scene

Oh god. Here's the first research paper that popped into my head: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/hdrplusdata.org/e...

"Surprisingly, daytime shots with high dynamic range may also suffer from lack of light."

"In low light, or in very high dynamic range scenes"

"For high dynamic range scenes we use local tone mapping"

You keep trying to define "HDR" differently than current literature. Not even current— that paper was published in 2016! Hey, maybe HDR meant something different in the 1990s, or maybe it was just ok to use "HDR" as shorthand for when things were less ambiguous. I honestly don't care, and you're only serving to confuse people.

> the aperture can be adjusted on an analog camera to make a scene with any dynamic range fit into the ~12 stops of range the film has, or the ~8 stops of range of paper or an old TV.

You sound nonsensical because you keep using the wrong terms. Going back to your first sentence that made no sense:

> Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want

You keep saying "range" when, from what I can tell, you mean "luminance." Changing a camera's aperture scales the luminance hitting your film or sensor. It does not alter the dynamic range of the scene.

Analog cameras cannot capture any range. By adjusting camera settings or attaching ND filters, you can change the window of luminance values that will fit within the dynamic range of your camera. To say a camera can "capture any range" is like saying, "I can fit that couch through the door, I just have to saw it in half."

> And I’ve used the Reinhard tone mapper in research papers, I’m quite familiar with it and personally know all three authors of that paper. I’ve even written a paper or maybe two on color spaces with one of them.

I'm sorry if correcting you triggers insecurities, but if you're going to make an appeal to authority, please link to your papers instead of hand waving about the people you know.

> The sentence “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?” is explicitly claiming that analog photographers use “HDR” capture,

No, it isn't. It's saying they captured HDR scenes.

> The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact claim Adams used HDR

You can't "use" HDR. It's an adjective, not a noun.

> Film’s 12 stops is not really “high” range by HDR standards, and a little exposure latitude isn’t where “HDR” came from.

The Reinhard tone mapper, a benchmark that regularly appears in research papers, specifically cites Ansel Adams as inspiration.

"A classic photographic task is the mapping of the potentially high dynamic range of real world luminances to the low dynamic range of the photographic print."

https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/docs/techreports/2002/pdf/UUCS-0...

> Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a counterpart called LDR that’s referring to 8 bits/channel RGB.

8-bits per channel does not describe dynamic range. If I attach an HLG transfer function on an 8-bit signal, I have HDR. Furthermore, assuming you actually meant 8-bit sRGB, nobody calls that "LDR." It's SDR.

> Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want.

This sentence makes no sense.