HDR: Colorist Talks Rubbish

Ever since coming into contact with HDR-loathing Steve Yedlin, Cullen Kelly’s discourse on HDR has become more and more detached from reality.

“As I just mentioned, the problem is that it’s very difficult to get a sense for what color space metric is required for me to deliver HDR to YouTube and what metadata has to be baked in, so that regardless of whatever flavor of HDR I master and can master here so that that’s going to reproduce one-to-one. That’s the first challenge, is even if I have an HDR master that I accurately mastered and that I can trust that what I was looking at was accurate, how do I actually get that to travel. There doesn’t seem to really be a solution to that for HDR for platforms like YouTube.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s really not that complicated, Kelly. Workflows for delivery to YouTube are well-established.

“If I flip you in between my SDR and my HDR rendering of your image and I show you what I think the HDR should be, you’re not going to see much change, really. What you’re going to see is some little twinkles and sparkles come to life.”

In other words, highlights are being robotically lifted in post just to give the image a slight sheen for no reason other than that the colorist thinks that’s what’s expected of them and not because they’re essential to the story.

“There was a really vocal school of thought for a while with HDR that actually felt that HDR meant that the image should be brighter like if you want to call it the exposure of the image, the way that the display rendered the like the display exposure of the image should actually go up because that’s cool for some reason. I feel like no one is really arguing that anymore. I haven’t heard that argument in a while and I’m glad because it’s a dopey argument but that was a whole school of thought like, ‘oh the image itself should be brighter’, and that was some of my first exposure to HDR is people saying you got to check out HDR, it lets you make your image brighter and me looking at the brighter image and going cool, that looks terrible.”

That is categorically false. There never was any such school of thought except in Kelly’s fevered imagination. No one has ever argued that HDR is about making the entire image brighter. We can’t recall a single instance of any cinematographer, producer, ASC technical committee member, DIT, movie reviewer, industry consultant, researcher, tech evangelist, SMPTE member, manufacturer, director, movie studio, post production house, color scientist, colorist or influencer who has ever uttered such an absurd and ridiculous thing. If there ever was such a school of thought, then surely Kelly can provide some documentation.