Comment by pavlov
3 days ago
It certainly was called HDR when those Cineon files were processed in a linear light workflow. And film was the only capture source available that could provide sufficient dynamic range, so IMO that makes it “HDR”.
But I agree that the term is such a wide umbrella that almost anything qualifies. Fifteen years ago you could do a bit of superwhite glows and tone mapping on 8-bpc and people called that look HDR.
Do you have any links from 1990ish that show use of “HDR”? I am interested in when “HDR” became a phrase people used. I believe I remember hearing it first around 1996 or 97, but it may have started earlier. It was certainly common by 2001. I don’t see that used as a term nor an acronym in the Cineon docs from 1995, but it does talk about log and linear spaces and limiting the dynamic range when converting. The Cineon scanner predates sRGB, and used gamma 1.7. https://dotcsw.com/doc/cineon1.pdf
This 10 bit scanner gave you headroom of like 30% above white. So yeah it qualifies as a type of high dynamic range when compared to 8 bit/channel RGB, but on the other hand, a range of [0 .. 1.3] isn’t exactly in the spirit of what “HDR” stands for. The term implicitly means a lot more than 1.0, not just a little. And again people developing HDR like Greg Ward and Paul Debevec were arguing for absolute units such as luminance, which the Cineon scanner does not do.