[pbw]

There's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.

[thrdbndndn]

The whole HDR scene still feels like a mess.

I know how bad the support for HDR is on computers (particularly Windows and cheap monitors), so I avoid consuming HDR content on them.

But I just purchased a new iPhone 17 Pro, and I was very surprised at how these HDR videos on social media still look like shit on apps like Instagram.

And even worse, the HDR video I shoot with my iPhone looks like shit even when playing it back on the same phone! After a few trials I had to just turn it off in the Camera app.

[johncolanduoni]

I wonder if it fundamentally only really makes sense for film, video games, etc. where a person will actually tune the range per scene. Plus, only when played on half decent monitors that don’t just squash BT.2020 so they can say HDR on the brochure.

[theshackleford]

The HDR implementation in Windows 11 is fine. And it's not even that bad in 11 in terms of titles and content officially supporting HDR. Most of the ideas that it's "bad" comes from the "cheap monitor" part, not windows.

I have zero issues and only an exceptional image on W11 with a PG32UQX.

[Forgeties79]

The only time I shoot HDR on anything is because I plan on crushing the shadows/raising highlights after the fact. S curves all the way. Get all the dynamic range you can and then dial in the look. Otherwise it just looks like a flat washed out mess most of the time

[munificent]

Just what we need, a new loudness war, but for our eyeballs.

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

[eru]

Interestingly, the loudness war was essentially fixed by the streaming services. They were in a similar situation as Tik Tok is now.

[morshu9001]

What if they did HDR for audio? So an audio file can tell your speakers to output at 300% of the normal max volume, even more than what compression can do.

[lambdaone]

It's presumably only a matter of time before there's a Wikipedia article for "Brightness war"

[crazygringo]

This is one of the reasons I don't like HDR support "by default".

HDR is meant to be so much more intense, it should really be limited to things like immersive full-screen long-form-ish content. It's for movies, TV shows, etc.

It's not what I want for non-immersive videos you scroll through, ads, etc. I'd be happy if it were disabled by the OS whenever not in full screen mode. Unless you're building a video editor or something.

[JoshTriplett]

Or a photo viewer, which isn't necessarily running in fullscreen.

[kmeisthax]

I would love to know who the hell thought adding "brighter than white" range to HDR was a good idea. Or, even worse, who the hell at Apple thought implementing that should happen by way of locking UI to the standard range. Even if you have a properly mastered HDR video (or image), and you've got your brightness set to where it doesn't hurt to look at, it still makes all the UI surrounding that image look grey. If I'm only supposed to watch HDR in fullscreen, where there's no surrounding UI, then maybe you should tone-map to SDR until I fullscreen the damn video?

[crazygringo]

Yup, totally agreed. I said the same thing in another comment -- HDR should be reserved only for full-screen stuff where you want to be immersed in it, like movies and TV shows.

Unless you're using a video editor or something, everything should just be SDR when it's within a user interface.

[jsheard]

Sounds like they need something akin to audio volume normalization but for video. You can go bright, but only in moderation, otherwise your whole video gets dimmed down until the average is reasonable.

[illiac786]

I was about to write that. The algorithm need to be chosen, what is mostly used for audio gain normalization? Rolling average?

[solarkraft]

Actually I don’t even agree with that. I don’t want to be flash banged.

[recursive]

My phone has this cool feature where it doesn't support HDR.

[illiac786]

Every phone has it, it’s called “power save mode” on most devices and provides additional advantages like preventing apps from doing too much stuff in the background. =)

[morshu9001]

HDR has a slight purpose, but the way it was rolled out was so disrespectful that I just want it permanently gone everywhere. Even the rare times it's used in a non-abusive way, it can hurt your eyes or make things display weirdly.

[adrian_b]

I agree that HDR has been mostly misused, but on the other hand the difference between the color space sRGB and the wider-gamut rendering enabled by the Rec. 2020 encoding of the movie is extremely obvious for me (sRGB has a very bad red primary color, which forces the desaturation of the colors in the yellow-orange-red-purple sector, where the human eye is most sensitive to hues and where there are many objects with saturated colors, e.g. flowers, fruits, clothes, whose colors are distorted by sRGB).

Because I want the Rec. 2020 and 10-bit color encoding, I must also choose HDR, as these features are usually only available together, even if I do not get any serious advantage from HDR and HDR-encoded movies can usually be viewed well only in a room with no light or with dim light, otherwise most of them are too dark.

[baby_souffle]

> The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse

The latest android release has a setting that is the HDR version of “volume leveling”.

[JoshTriplett]

That's true on the web, as well; HDR images on web pages have this problem.

It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR". But you could probably catch the most egregious cases, like "every single pixel in the video has brightness above 80%".

[kmeisthax]

Funnily enough HDR already has to detect this problem, because most HDR monitors literally do not have the power circuitry or cooling to deliver a complete white screen at maximum brightness.

My idea is: for each frame, grayscale the image, then count what percentage of the screen is above the standard white level. If more than 20% of the image is >SDR white level, then tone-map the whole video to the SDR white point.

[eru]

> It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR".

That sounds like a job our new AI overlords could probably handle. (But that might be overkill.)

[ElasticBottle]

Can someone explain what the war is about?

Like HDR abuse makes it sound bad, because the video is bright? Wouldn't that just hurt the person posting it since I'd skip over a bright video?

Sorry if I'm phrasing this all wrong, don't really use TikTok

[JoshTriplett]

> Wouldn't that just hurt the person posting it since I'd skip over a bright video?

Sure, in the same way that advertising should never work since people would just skip over a banner ad. In an ideal world, everyone would uniformly go "nope"; in our world, it's very much analogous to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war .

[johncolanduoni]

Not everything that glitters (or blinds) is gold.

[dylan604]

sounds like every fad that came before it where it was over used by all of the people copying with no understanding of what it is or why. remember all of the HDR still images that pushed everything to look post-apocalyptic? remember all of the people pushing washed out videos because they didn't know how to grade the images recorded in log and it became a "thing"?

eventually, it'll wear itself out just like every other over use of the new

[hbn]

HDR videos on social media look terrible because the UI isn’t in HDR while the video isn’t. So you have this insanely bright video that more or less ignores your brightness settings, and then dim icons on top of it that almost look incomplete or fuzzy cause of their surroundings. It looks bizarre and terrible.

[crazygringo]

The alternative is even worse, where the whole UI is blinding you. Plus, that level of brightness isn't meant to be sustained.

The solution is for social media to be SDR, not for the UI to be HDR.

[NathanielK]

It's good if you have black text on white background, since your app can have good contrast without searing your eyes. People started switching to dark themes to avoid having their eyeballs seared monitors with the brightness high.

For things filmed with HDR in mind it's a benefit. Bummer things always get taken to the extreme.

[hombre_fatal]

Not sure how it works on Android, but it's such amateur UX on Apple's part.

99.9% of people expect HDR content to get capped / tone-mapped to their display's brightness setting.

That way, HDR content is just magically better. I think this is already how HDR works on non-HDR displays?

For the 0.01% of people who want something different, it should be a toggle.

Unfortunately I think this is either (A) amateur enshittification like with their keyboards 10 years ago, or (B) Apple specifically likes how it works since it forces you to see their "XDR tech" even though it's a horrible experience day to day.

[nine_k]

But isn't it the point? Try looking at a light bulb; everything around it is so much less bright.

OTOH pointing a flaslight at your face is at least impolite. I would put a dark filter on top of HDR vdeos until a video is clicked for watching.