Apple did a clever thing with HDR content where it can appear amongst other non-HDR content, and only the part of the screen displaying the HDR content is in HDR. But in practice it looks really bad and I hate every time I'm scrolling Instagram and an HDR video appears in my feed. It blows my eyes out and then the rest of my screen looks gray and muted for a few seconds until I get the HDR content off my screen.
When done tastefully it’s actually amazing. Especially videos which have bright sun illuminating some surfaces and other surfaces are in the shadows. It really looks like the sun is shining, I can feel the endorphin is shooting through my veins.
However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.
(a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits.
(b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255] to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them.
(c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect of (b) under most circumstances.
(c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your face.
In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
I have to agree with the iPhone camera in bright settings. It doesn’t look good.
Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my digital camera and the photos will come out really good.
It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are technically limited in capturing it.
A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you can get way better results with digital if you know what to do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.
Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2. someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
Actually the whole screen is HDR, but the non-HDR parts are dimmed to match their normal brightness. They can do this because they calibrate their displays and know exactly how bright they are.
By the way, if brightness is not maxed this works even on the 400 nits macbook air m1, which they call EDR. They ramp up to max brightness and dim the non-HDR parts.
It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air), they must be leaving some brightness margin to allow for this to work on any brightness level - maybe except for outdoor lighting conditions? I had to blast the ambient light sensor with my phone's flash to get the screen bright enough so that the HDR content disappears. When the auto-brightness is turned off, you can still see the HDR content up until the top settings, just one bar down is enough to display it.
The switch from SDR to HDR is also interesting, when an HDR content is to be displayed it slowly fades into HDR. It must be tamping up the backlight of the LCD when tinting the SDR content simultaneously to create the gradual brightness increase effect in the HDR areas. The fact that the SDR area doesn't flicker when this happens, gives me the impression that the Apple do amazing screen calibration.
> It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air)
No it doesn't, I'm trying it out right now on my M1 Air. If my screen brightness is max, the video isn't extra-bright in Chrome or in Safari. If I turn down the screen brightness, it does stand out.
I don't know what you're talking about having to "blast the ambient light sensor" to get your screen to max brightness, that's not how my M1 Air works and it's not how any Mac laptop is supposed to work. That's used for "Automatically adjust brightness" (which I have on) but that's overridden at any moment just by using the brightness buttons on your keyboard to turn it up to the max. So I'm not sure how you think you've got your brightness "maxed out" but it seems you don't. You might have some other setting preventing it, like automatic screen dimming in battery mode.
Also, try not to get worked up for such stuff on the internet. Yas it appears that when plugged to the wall, it does lose the HDR-white on max brightness. Still, even on max - 1, HDR is displayed properly.
On iPhone 14 Pro, which has the ability to display full HDR content, also can't display the HDR-White when the brightness is cranked up to the max.
In my book, M1 Air and iPhone 14 Pro are both capable of displaying HDR-white. Just don't go to absolute peak brightness, which only happens under direct sunlight anyway("blast the ambient light sensor" part, simulating extremely bright environment).
> Also, try not to get worked up for such stuff on the internet. Yas it appears that when plugged to the wall, it does lose the HDR-white on max brightness. Still, even on max - 1, HDR is displayed properly.
Correcting misinformation isn't "getting worked up", please don't insinuate anything like that. HDR is still fairly new so it's important that misinformation doesn't spread.
And as your comment suggests, it's only because your Mac is temporarily reducing its brightness in battery mode (also sometimes due to heavy CPU usage, that the battery can't fully drive the display and chips).
But your assertion that "absolute peak brightness... only happens under direct sunlight" is false. As you yourself are seeing, you achieve the same when merely plugged in, no ambient light required.
Hang on, Apple don't calibrate each display individualy. They profile a characteristic display, and then apply that characteristic profile to all of their displays.
If you want a calibrated display you will need to buy some calibration hardware! Displays change over time too...so frequent calibration is needed.
Edit: If you want to prove this to yourself grab the display profile off another mac and compare it. It will be the same.
Anyway, the profile is accurate enough that the dimming of non-HDR parts while ramping up brightness is not noticeable to me if I block off the HDR part.
Part of the problem is mobile devices often grade their videos “too hot.” This Demuxed[1] talk has a pretty good overview of the problem in the industry and ideas for improving it (and to avoid confusion, the talk is given from the perspective of someone in the future looking back on HDR in the industry).
Honestly I think it kind of makes both look bad. Everything else looks muted, but also the HDR content itself looks cartoonishly over-saturated because your eyes are not in the context of seeing colors like that on your screen as it is.
My opinion of this way of handling HDR is kinda mixed when it comes to phones, but on computers and tablets I prefer it to the way that e.g. Windows handles HDR, where non-HDR parts of the screen look weirdly dim, which makes you want to only turn HDR on when running a game that supports it or something like that.
