Comment by martomi
5 years ago
If I understand correctly, you're looking for a simplified RAW image editor? Many digital cameras allow storing RAW images alongside JPEG. The viewer can then load the RAW images into any (web-based) image viewer/editor that supports RAW format and have full control over tone mapping.
The tool interface needs to be simplified to make it a better fit for the use-case you present but I don't see computing power as a bottleneck.
Of course they'd still be limited by the dynamic range of the camera. This can also be resolved by calculating irradiance map based on multiple RAW images taken with different exposure times.
I think there is a fundamental difference between editor (designed to produce a deliverable) and viewer (designed for immediate experience) software. One of the things essential to the latter but really to the former is immediacy, hence I suspect that the computing powers commonly available today make it impossible for now (but likely not for much longer).
(Edit: “not really to the former”)
Apart from performance, another crucial thing is that the viewer must not have to think about technical aspects (like exposure, color profile, etc.), as you noted, so the GUI would have to be radically different.
I am envisioning producers bundling N processing profiles with their “digital negative”, and software that somehow allows the user to fluidly explore the perception of the scene by interpolating inside an (N-1)-dimensional space bounded by parameters in those profiles with really low latency.