Criteria for Evaluating Online Instruction

As the number of online HDR tutorials grows, it becomes necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. The best way to go about that is pretty straightforward – just have a look at the content creators’ own footage: is it noisy? blurry? are highlights clipped? how about tonal gradations, or lack thereof? compression artifacts? Do they recommend using an NLE like Final Cut Pro, which is unsuitable for HDR grading, or DaVinci Resolve Studio, which is optimized for HDR? Do they recommend shooting RAW or instead, a markedly inferior 4:2:2 codec? What about skin tones? Unfortunately, things don’t look too promising at the moment, ranging from the downright unacceptable to somewhat worse than what any current mobile device can capture on a bad day. We’ll be adding to the list as more contenders appear.