How Innovation Happens in Imaging: Go Make Some HDR Shit
I'm an innovation pro with a multi-decade interest in how innovations in displays drive innovations in visual experiences. For a portion of that time, innovations in displays were slow and incremental and mostly relegated to certain device classes like mobile. But, in the past 5 years, the pace of innovation has picked up considerably and the research from the creator tools companies wanting to take advantage of those innovations is beginning to emerge.
Chief among those recent innovations is high dynamic range/wide color gamut (HDR/WCG).
See the HDR video below of various HDR editing and viewing tools being used with a variety of HDR content types conveying the state of HDR still images in May 2023. It shows visualizations within those tools that are helpful for developing an intuition for what HDR is via coordinated changes to analytical/statistical (histogram annotated with regions related to HDR) and visual views for HDR still imagery.
(Turn on Closed Captions for the YouTube Video)
Among the most interesting and vital areas of HDR-related innovations is HDR still imagery, the slimmed down imagery we send to end-user devices. Here, there are 2 major technical directions being pursued:
- There are still image formats purpose-built for HDR that have editing support in creative tools today and that can be served directly to significant numbers of end-users today. AVIF from Google is one such format with <img> and background-image support in Google Chrome today. This approach has the quality of requiring some mechanism by which you can provide a non-HDR version (often called a standard dynamic range image) to devices with non-HDR displays.
- There is an "HDR Gain Map" tech path that through clever engineering allows the most popular still image formats of today (e.g. JPEG and PNG) to support both HDR and non-HDR displays in a single file, could emerge in creative tools from Adobe, speculatively sometime in 2023, could be distributed to end-users in apps running the next major versions of Android (14 Upside-Down Cake) and Google Chrome (116, wide availability in the next months). The major distinguishing quality of HDR Gain Maps formats are their automatic backward compatibility with existing platforms, with a small quality performance loss to have that backward compatibility. See the links below for closely-related HDR Gain Map specs from Adobe and Google, sample HDR gain map photos, and an Adobe sample viewer for Windows and macOS.
As I consider which of the two approaches will get adoption in what proportion and on what timelines, the fact that so much logic is already applied with responsive images where we serve just the right image given a user's device qualities leads me to believe that purpose built HDR formats (1. above) will see significant adoption. But, the draw of backward compatibility at low quality cost for HDR displays, the runtime display-adaptivity, and the considerable investment already made in HDR Gain Maps by Google in its platforms, leads me to think HDR Gain Maps will be the primary/first choice for large parts of image land, only held back in the near-term by the lack of creative tools support.
If you're a designer wanting to start experimenting, grab your favorite design technologist, ideate together on what kinds of prototypes on what platforms with what HDR/WCG displays you could build, and make some HDR shit. Or, follow me here as I do the same. Also, spend some time developing an intuition and language for what HDR creation/editing means through coordinated views like in the screencast above.
For product and design leaders who need to consider when and how much to invest in HDR imagery, now would not be too early to begin obtaining state of the art HDR displays, prioritizing use cases, and prototyping. And, look for a future post where I give more granular advice on timing and level of investment for different types of companies.
(I've been blessed to get an up-close view of these innovations through collaboration with Björn Ottosson (a world-class image processing researcher), Rafał Mantiuk (a veteran researcher doing important work bringing together the graphics and displays traditions/communities), and more informally the scientists and engineers at Google, Adobe, Krita and elsewhere making sure we have strong foundations upon which to experiment and create with HDR.)
This is the first in a series of posts on HDR imaging. Follow me or one of these tags to see future posts: #HDR #DisplayAdaptive #DesignTechnology
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HDR-Capable Still Image Tools
Adobe Camera Raw. Great general HDR support and output support is in a tech preview. AVIF export.
Affinity Photo. Great general HDR support in v2. No AVIF export, so you'll need to use separate tool for export from Affinity's EXR/HDR export format.
Krita for Windows. Download 5.2 as it has many HDR/WCG improvements. Has AVIF export support. I used this app for my earliest HDR work upgrading imagery for a web-based app.
HDR Gain Map Viewers
Use Chrome Canary 114+ and enable "Gainmap HDR image rendering" in chrome://flags/
https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/gain-map.html (for Windows and macOS)
Sample HDR Gain Map Images
https://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/hdr/jpeg-gain-map.php (gain map image examples in web page)
Specs and Other Backgrounders