The Complete HDR Zone System Primer

The Practical Zone System for Film and Digital Photography

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Please try your request again later. After retiring from the publishing industry, Harrop moved to Colorado in and entered higher education. Are you an author? Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central.

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Available for download now. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. The guys and gals who spend their lives in editing suites and grading bays have their monitors setup to this standard. They are working their butts off to make sure the images look good and serve the artistic intent of the authors. They make sure dark parts of the image are in fact dark but still have detail, and that bright parts are bright without being blown out.

In short, they are maximizing the dynamic range of the system we have all be working and living with for decades. What happens if you deviate from that nit standard? If you simply lower the white level, everything gets darker and your dynamic range goes down the drain.

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Let me say that again: Those dark areas of the picture where you should be able to see detail will just become muddy black. The midtones such as, you know, people and such, will all look dim and unnatural. In short, the picture will look like crap.

Incidentally, the way to watch a correctly calibrated TV, especially a smaller one, in a pitch black room, is not to. A properly calibrated nit TV is going to be completely washed out by sunlight. So you turn up the white level…. So to get those back you raise the black level. So you raise brightness further and now you have a picture which is so flat and washed out that the director of photography is weeping openly at how you have ruined all their hard work.

If you want to claim high performance video in your home, you are going to have to A put the system in not a pitch black room, but a light controlled one and B calibrate the display to the SDR standard.

And when you do, SDR looks darn good. Compromise on either of these and you compromise picture integrity.

Thomas Harrop (Author of The Complete Digital Photography Primer)

HDR is NOT simply about raising the peak white level to something higher so that you can watch Casablanca in a sunlight room. No, no, no and no. The way our eyes work precludes it. The ideal environment remains a light controlled room! If that is the case, why would we want to raise peak white?

Audio chains have dynamic range as well, only here we are talking about the delta between the quietest sound think: What level was, say, dialogue? It was a perfectly natural 60 dB — 70 dB for a conversation, somewhat louder for someone yelling. Basically it sounded very close to what it sounds like in real life. Same goes for everything else in the soundtrack. Whispers sound like whispers, conversation sounds like conversation, and the clash of swords sound like… swords clashing I guess.

Then began the golden era of Cinema Sound advancements. Dolby Stereo raised the bar to about 90 dB. SR noise reduction gave us an extra 3 dB, and when we finally landed on Dolby Digital the dynamic range was a whopping dB. Now the loudest sound you hear from any one given speaker is an ear-splitting dB.

The Practical Zone System for Film and Digital Photography, 6th Edition

But what happened to the level of dialogue? Lousy, irresponsible mixes aside; it should still be the same 60 dB — 70 dB! Increasing the dynamic range is simply that: It does NOT mean that the entire soundtrack is raised up in level. Think about that long and hard. The sounds of birds chirping, people talking, and what have you, are all at the same level they were before we increased the dynamic range.

If we port the concept over to video it should be fairly intuitive to realize that by increasing the dynamic range of the video system, we do NOT want to simply make the whole picture brighter.

This is a huge misconception which is circulating right now and which we ask you to help quash. A typical indoor scene, the shadows in the corner etc.

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In other words, even though we might spec a system which can go to , 1,, or 10, nits, the APL may get somewhat brighter, but it is not going to skyrocket. Then a scene will come along and it will hit you…. Note overall APL is similar. This is a still from hdr A very dark scene, very low APL, but with dazzling highlights. Note how most areas of the image, in particular the dark and shadow areas, are for the most part unchanged from SDR to HDR.

The Complete HDR Zone System Primer (B&W)

Naturally the eye zeros in on the brighter furnace flame and the bright molten steel and sparks, but notice also the area around the flame and the flame itself has more apparent detail despite it being so bright. Well, we can, but we have to get some things in order first. Ok, so we solve that by moving to a 10bit system, redistribute the bits, and pick a new nice and high white point. And in a couple years 4, Maybe 10, just a few years later yes folks, that is the plan. For that reason, we need HDR to be a system which can easily and transparently scale in the coming years…and therein lays the challenge.

If we master some content today to a peak white of, say, 1, nits, we need to be able to display that on a device which might only be capable of And in a few years we need that same mastered-to-1, content to display correctly on a display capable of 4, nits or whatever. What we need is not just a standard, but a system. And we have one. Well, we have two darn it, possibly more.

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