Highlights Aren’t Islands

Sony European Imaging Ambassador Alister Chapman uses his platform to promote categorically false claims about HDR:

“It’s only when you have specular highlights and direct light sources in the scene that are brighter than diffuse white that any differences start to become apparent. The entire image doesn’t change, only these highlights do…” – Alister Chapman, Sony European Imaging Ambassador | Cross-published on Facebook and LinkedIn (Nov. 2025)

The assertion that highlights are isolated phenomena that leave all other image elements identical to SDR is demonstrably false and contradicted by decades of research on human vision. The McCann & Rizzi papers demonstrate that highlights physically alter the perception of contrast and detail across the entire image through the mechanism of veiling glare:

“Image-dependent intraocular scatter changes identical display luminances into different retinal luminances. Vision’s contrast mechanism further distorts any correlation of scene luminance and appearance [1].”

Highlights directly and measurably change how we perceive the contrast and depth of the entire scene, not just the bright spots.

By ignoring veiling glare, Chapman constructs a theoretical HDR that simply does not and cannot exist.

1. J. J. McCann & A. Rizzi. “Veiling glare: the dynamic range limit of HDR images”.  Proceedings of SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering. (Mar. 2007)

Sony Ambassador Alister Chapman’s HDR Claims Debunked, Part II