HDR in games and real life

[Mescalamba]

HDR in photos is actually same as game without HDR..

When you look from dark room to bright out.. you´ll be probably able to see both quite ok (unless its extreme light and extreme darkness). What HDR photo does is, that you can see equaly both - light and dark places. But none of them has correct "light" in them.. dark places are usually too light, and light places just bit darker, than in real life. Its just way to put details from light/dark to one pic.. usually done by taking pics of light + normal + dark and putting that together, after bit of PS work, it will create somewhat watchable result.

HDR photos are never accurate, cause sensors can´t capture everything that human eye can at one shot .. and putting it together from few shots needs some afterprocessing, which is never accurate and even if it was, you can´t display it. Cause it has bit more information, than you can display on conventional display.. cause even displays has limited dynamic range. Eg. until we get HDR cam sensors and HDR displays.. we are left with semi-accurate HDR pics at best.. usually HDR pics are used more as art, than reproduction of real world.

HDR in games, actually doesn´t have anything with high dynamic range at all, cause.. in normal game, you simply see everything.. so in some way, you have unrealistic high dynamic range. HDR in games, actually lowers your dynamic range, so you when you go out from dark cave, you see at first dark cave.. and just light outside, when go out, you get blinded by light and then you see everything around normal and totaly dark cave.. which, if its implemented right, its somewhat near real world.. but usually this effect is overshoted so hard, that it has nothing to do with real life, and its way slower than in real life.. I guess that term "Reduced dynamic range" wouldn´t sound that good, so they call it HDR.. even if its in fact opposite.

Tough, both are trying to be closer to real world. Games by reducing dynamic range and photos by adding it (cause cam sensors can´t capture that much as human eye at one shot). It has lot to do with reality in both cases, but less to do with real HDR in game case.