Many people are, understandably, confused about brightness levels in content creation and consumption - both for SDR and for HDR content. Even people that do content creation as their job sometimes get it really wrong.
For one it assumes all sRGB monitors utilize gamma2.2 for decoding images
Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no.
There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.
That a certain percentage of displays don’t behave like expected is annoying, but doesn’t really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).
this is why windows HDR uses the inverse oetf. Decoding content graded on a pure 2.2 display with the inverse oetf is way better then decoding content graded on an inverse oetf display with a pure 2.2. Windows took the safe route of making sure most content looks at least OK. I would not say that windows HDR is wrong, it’s not right, but it’s not wrong either. this is just the mess that sRGB gave us.
The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.
Another time you should be using the inverse sRGB OETF to linearize content when the original content was encoded using the sRGB oetf and you want to go back to that working data, but this applies less to compositors and more to authoring workflows.
Makes sense.
People have been adjusting monitor brightness for ages. Sometimes manually, sometimes with DDC etc.
That’s a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment.
With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can’t properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above “PQ absolute”.
Another issue that is brought up is “graphics white” BT.2408 is a suggestion, not a hard coded spec, many different specs or suggestions use a different “graphics white” value.
I didn’t claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn’t dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that’s irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.
A good example of this is JXL.
Can you expand on what you mean with that?
2408 also very explicitly says ‘The signal level of “HDR Reference White” is not directly related to the signal level of SDR “peak white”.’
That “directly” is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.
Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won’t rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.
this is important to note because this directly contradicts the some of the seemingly core assumptions made in the article, and even some of the bullet points like “a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white” and “SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too”
No contradictions at all. The Wayland protocol defines these things to be the same, so for application developers they just are the same, end of story.
This needs to be expanded upon that this does NOT correlate to what the general user understands HDR and SDR to be. HDR and SDR in the terms of video content is no more then a marketing term and without context it can be hard to define what it is, However it is abundantly clear from this quote here that how they are interpreting HDR and SDR (which is a very valid technically inclined way of interpreting it) does NOT fall inline with general user expectation.
That’s just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.
And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.
Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no. There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.
That a certain percentage of displays don’t behave like expected is annoying, but doesn’t really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).
The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.
Makes sense.
That’s a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment.
With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can’t properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above “PQ absolute”.
I didn’t claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn’t dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that’s irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.
Can you expand on what you mean with that?
That “directly” is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.
Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won’t rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.
No contradictions at all. The Wayland protocol defines these things to be the same, so for application developers they just are the same, end of story.
That’s just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.
And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.