Comment by munificent
2 days ago
> The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion
That isn't what the article claims. It says:
"Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers of the 20th century, was a master at capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes."
"Use HDR" (your term) is vague to the point of not meaning much of anything, but the article is clear that Adams was capturing scenes that had a high dynamic range, which is objectively true.
I think about the Ansel Adams zone system
https://www.kimhildebrand.com/how-to-use-the-zone-system/
where my interpretation is colored by the experience of making high quality prints and viewing them under different conditions, particularly poor illumination quality but you could also count "small handheld game console", "halftone screened and printed on newsprint" as other degraded conditions. In those cases you might imagine that the eye can only differentiate between 11 tones so even if an image has finer detail it ought to connect well with people if colors were quantized. (I think about concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon which looked great printed with a thermal printer because it was designed to look great on a cheap screen.)
In my mind, the ideal image would look good quantized to 11 zones but also has interesting detail in texture in 9 of the zones (extreme white and black don't show texture). That's a bit of an oversimplification (maybe a shot outdoors in the snow is going to trend really bright, maybe for artistic reasons you want things to be really dark, ...) but Ansel Adams manually "tone mapped" his images using dodging, burning and similar techniques to make it so.
Literally the sentence preceding the one you quoted is “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?”.
And that quote specifically does not "lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together".
It is directly addressing capture.
Correct. I didn’t say that sentence was the source of the conflation, I said it was the source of the Ansel Adams problem. There are other parts that mix together capture, formats, and display.
Edit: and btw I am objecting to calling film capture “HDR”, I don’t think that helps define HDR nor reflects accurately on the history of the term.
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Yes, Ansel Adams was using a camera to capture a scene that had high dynamic range.
I don't see the confusion here.
HDR is not referring to the scene’s range, and it doesn’t apply to film. It’s referring superficially but specifically to a digital process that improves on 8 bits/channel RGB images. And one of the original intents behind HDR was to capture pixels in absolute physical measurements like radiance, to enable a variety of post-processing workflows that are not available to film.
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