During a livestream, Cullen Kelly takes a question from the chat: Why aren’t more YouTubers, especially colorists, not making their videos in HDR?
The first thing Kelly does is recommend listening to Steve Yedlin’s anti-HDR rant. Since associating with Yedlin, Kelly parrots his colleague’s talking points—even when sharing what he thinks is a profound insight but which is actually stated in the standards themselves:
“But here’s the thing to understand about HDR. I’m going to steal it directly from my buddy Steve Yedlin. [He asks the mod to drop a link to Steve Yedlin’s anti-HDR rant in the chat] John, before I keep going, remind me. Is it tricky or not possible to drop links into the chat for these sessions? […] The one I had specifically in mind as you’re doing that, John, is my buddy Steve Yedlin’s three-hour deep dive on HDR. If the linking doesn’t work, go to yedlin.net and you’ll find a Debunking HDR demo on there. But I’m stealing his language directly when I say that HDR doesn’t have a look. HDR allows for a bit more variation in the look you can create, but in and of itself, it does not prescribe a look.”
Kelly calls this “stealing”—when SMPTE ST 2084 basically says the exact same thing:
“The EOTF does not impart a preferred rendering appearance for any particular viewing environment. Image modifications needed for viewer contrast, colorfulness, highlight details, and visible detail in shadows at any particular output level must be chosen as part of the mastering process.”
For Kelly, SDR represents the pinnacle of image-making. It goes without saying that it’s the primary creative canvas:
“When I’m doing HDR workflows, typically we will start with an SDR normal dynamic range that runs as far back as moving images do. It’s a pretty good precedent to start from.”
Now for the kicker: Kelly has absolutely no idea how to upload HDR videos to YouTube; for him, it’s a mystical dark art:
“So the question of why aren’t more YouTubers doing stuff in HDR, I’II give you my direct answer to that. I think number one, workflow wise, it’s still really hard to do. Like I know we’ve kicked around like, hey, should we start doing HDR stuff on YouTube? And the last time we looked, I don’t know, six to eight months ago or like it seems pretty complex.”
Adding insult to injury, Kelly refers to HDR as a “color space” at (32:35) and uses phrases like “HDR display space” at (29:48), erasing HDR’s defining feature (its reference EOTF) and shortchanging his students.
Kelly promotes his community group Colorist, Inc., offering an SDR-first Dolby Vision workshop as a solution to a problem created by the very misinformation he endorses:
“A hands-on workshop on the custom Dolby Vision workflow I use to get better images, faster, without being handcuffed to an HDR-first approach. (It also directly saves you $1,000 on your first pro Dolby Vision grade).”
Source: Live: Pro Colorist AMA. Cullen Kelly YouTube channel. Sept. 26, 2026
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