HDR

From DmWiki

High dynamic range, acronymed as HDR, is a term used in computer graphics when referring to doing color manipulations using higher precision than 8 bpc (bits per channel), i.e. 24-bit color images. For example a source image stored using an HDR format might contain 16, 32 or even 64 bpc, for a total of 48, 96 or 192 bits respectively. The color channels are normally stored using float data type. In theory they can store negative values as well, but to my knowledge it's normally not used. The pixel values aren't just between 0-255 as in 8 bpc (or 0.0 to 1.0 in normalized color space floats) imaging but in a much larger range, e.g. 0.0 to 1e37 for 32-bit floats, which is pretty nice indeed.

Using HDR one can more easily simulate natural light conditions, i.e. a really bright sunlight using actual light intensities.

When using HDR in computer games, a post process must be applied to the resulting image (which can be seen as exposure in a camera) to map the colors in the image to a useful range. This is called tone mapping.

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