Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I feel like we might finally be on the edge of seeing widespread HDR uptake.

I recently discovered Gain Maps! It's a technique that allows existing file types such as JPG to display HDR content, but to also gracefully fall back to SDR if HDR is unavailable, or if the application simply doesn't understand gain maps. Basically, they store an SDR version of the file, but also store a "gain map" layer in the metadata of the file that gets applied to the SDR version, and transforms it to HDR.

Most modern phones can produce gain maps (though they don't always do so by default). Firefox and Chrome can both support HDR (though they're both in the early stages).

My TV, my monitors, my phone, all display HDR.

All that's missing is HDR content. We finally have all the parts of the framework to display HDR in play, and a backward compatible path to get there, so hopefully, finally, we'll start to see more content!

A girl can dream...

#hdr #photography #videography