I am very excited to see the growing support for deeper bit depth screens with the adaptive modes, JXL support, etc. This can't happen soon enough for me, so qudos all round for this work. However....
Even in Lightroom itself, Grid and Survey mode do the HDR->SDR (terrible), whereas the Develop module and Loupe do HDR rendering. On an iPhone (to just take one quick example) a JPEG (with HD content) will only render properly sometimes, but is often displayed as the HDR->SDR (terrible) mode. I cannot see any way that I would be comfortable, or gain any benefit, to distribute a JPEG file with HD content and nobody I've shown it to wants HDR content in a JPEG file because of this.
So, I think this comment from the Adobe Blog about the new Adaptive mode worries me that this is just compounding the problem:
"Using the Adobe Adaptive profile is straightforward.... For a regular SDR image make sure that HDR Output is not checked. If you forget to do this, the resulting HDR JPEG file can still be displayed on an SDR screen, but what you see is not the Adobe Adaptive SDR look but the HDR look compressed into SDR."
I understand that I can explicitly turn HDR off, and get an SDR file, which is fantastic! But I think the default should be that JPEG ONLY supports SDR content by default, and the only way that you get HDR content in a JPEG is for you to EXPLICITLY enable it.
To try to help this not become a real problem I would really like to see Adobe (and Apple, etc for that matter):
(1) Treat JPEG files by default as SDR only - the only way to ever have "HDR content" in a JPEG file is to explicitly enable it
- a "buyer beware" stance
(2) For HDR content, the recommendation should be to distribute in explicitly supported formats (such as JXL)
- and then we should be able to see faster and broader adoption of JXL support and know where it won't be rendered properly (which yes, at this point in time is still bad, even in Lightroom!!!)
I understand the desire for "compatibility", but nobody I've shown it to, wants to distribut HDR because if it is not supported, it looks terrible. So, why complicate this and propogate this further.
Thanks
William Stewart
AdChoices