Please add HDR display support

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
July 8, 2022
13 replies
1488 views

I want to make HDR paintings that can be displayed on HDR TVs and Monitors but photoshop seems to only display SDR. There's no difference in the lumanence from the display of the color White +0 and the color White +1.

For me HDR is one of the most important display innovations since HD and making content based around it even images would be useful. Since many image viewers support HDR color now days.

I'm sure there would also be benefits for things like games which HDR textures are very useful and being able to better visually read value differences beyond +0 would be useful.

I know premiere supports display HDR, so I also imagine it would be useful for making sprite/image effects for video, or animation.

Windows

sacb0yAuthor

Known Participant

Ok so i've discovered something it turns out HDR display is partially supported, and it's only in Camera Raw for some reason.

Which is quite frustrating TBH. It really needs to be photoshop wide.

The need for these tools has FAR exceeded photography, and applies to general media like games and art.

Z

ZBalling

Inspiring

"Xbox and Xbox Game Bar on windows."

And Nvidia overlay too.

sacb0yAuthor

Known Participant

Thing is JXR already has widespread use due to Xbox and Xbox Game Bar on windows. Plus windows has native support for the format in it's photo viewer.

I would wager the majority of HDR images most average people have is JXR. Hence why support would help with adoption of HDR in general.

G

gregbenz

Inspiring

JXR (JPEG XR) compatibilty with web browsers is extremely low. See https://caniuse.com/jpegxr

JXL (JPEG XL) would have been great, but it's been removed from Google Chrome and not in any production web browser.

PNG supports HDR, but the encoding is not well supported by browsers. Also, PNG is much larger than AVIF. You could use similar tricks with ICC profiles in other image formats (including standard JPG), but you'll have the same problem with the image not being rendered well outside of programs like Photoshop. Aside from lack of support for such ICC profiles, embedding them add unnecssary file bloat which is avoided with newer color management mechanisms (NCLX, CICP) that describe the color info in just a few bytes.

AVIF is definintely the way to go for HDR images on the web.

sacb0yAuthor

Known Participant

But yeah lack of windows support is a huge and annoying problem for me >:/

sacb0yAuthor

Known Participant

Supposedly JXR (Common with Xbox and Windows Game screenshots) is compatible with web browsers too but i've never seen a demo of it.

G

gregbenz

Inspiring

Adobe has added HDR support for Windows with ACR v15.1. https://gregbenzphotography.com/other/acr-v15-1-adds-avif-exports-and-hdro-support-for-windows/.

ACR v15.1 also includes support to export AVIF images, which allows sharing HDR images on the web. I have several images exported from ACR v15.1 on my site: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr/

I've also created a test page which dynamically serves SDR (standard dynamic range) or HDR images based on the capabilities of the browser/monitor used to view the page: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gallery/. There is a green button on the site to toggle the images so you can compare how the alternative version (SDR/HDR) compares on your display. In general, HDR images look vastly better on an HDR display, while SDR images are still optimal for SDR displays. I find the highlight color is oversaturated with the tone mapping that occurs when viewing the HDR image on an SDR display. There's probably both more I could do to optimize the image as well as opportunity for tone mapping to improve, so there may ultimately be a way to share an HDR image without penalty on SDR displays. We're early in the technology adoption and I think everyone has much to learn.

Note that the tech preview for PS itself is not available for Windows users as of PS v24.1. But you can still do subsequent 32-bit editing in PS of images you create in ACR. At the bottom of every image in PS is document information (such as size) and you can toggle this to the "32-bit exposure" slider. Drag it left and right to view HDR content which exceeds the capabilities of your display (this not only helps HDR editing on an SDR display, but also lets you work on HDR images intended for brighter HDR screens).

G

gregbenz

Inspiring

Thanks, @Conrad_C

Agreed, I'd love to see broad support of HDR. With video/games leading the way, there's a lot of latent capability out there. Computer monitors are lagging for many, but the latest Apple XDR displays are unreal. Browser support will hopefully pick up quickly. @ZBalling's HDR AVIF image in this thread is a good example - won't currently render on Safari (AVIF support coming this fall to MacOS), looks nearly black on the current FireFox, but looks great on Chrome.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Sorry, I didn’t realize this was Mac only at this time, thanks Greg for confirming (Hey, I just watched your excellent video on star trails!). I’ll upvote this request.