> HDR tonemapping trying to emulate human vision is mostly bullshit and generally looks awful anyway.
This is just because most of the academic researchers in the field (basically mathematicians/programmers) have horrible aesthetic taste and poor understanding of human vision, not because the concept of local contrast control is inherently bad.
HDR “tonemapping” when well done doesn’t call attention to itself, and you won’t notice it per se.
This is a problem with image processing in general. Researchers are looking for something to demo at SIGGRAPH to non-artists. They want something very obvious and fancy on a few hand-picked images for a 5 minute talk. They aren’t necessarily trying to build general-purpose tools for artists.
Real photographers use all kinds of trickery to control contrast and dynamic range. Ansel Adams tweaked the hell out of his photographs at every stage from capture to print, using pre-exposed negatives, non-standard chemistry timings, contrast-adjusting masks sandwiched with negatives, tons of dodging and burning, etc.
Right, but what you are talking about is a very involved, creative process (what I would call color grading), not an automatic tone-mapping operator which you would apply on an image and hope it doesn't look like crap.
I think “color grading”, “color correction”, “photo retouching”, “image editing”, etc. are all pretty terrible names. Unfortunately there isn’t a great alternative name.
The old term was “printing”, but to a layman that now connotes pressing a button to get an inkjet or whatever.
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You can certainly come up with automatic operators which look better than “hard clip everything brighter than 1.0”.
I agree though that there should be more work put into making usable tools for artists instead of “let’s magically fix the picture in one click”.
This is just because most of the academic researchers in the field (basically mathematicians/programmers) have horrible aesthetic taste and poor understanding of human vision, not because the concept of local contrast control is inherently bad.
HDR “tonemapping” when well done doesn’t call attention to itself, and you won’t notice it per se.
This is a problem with image processing in general. Researchers are looking for something to demo at SIGGRAPH to non-artists. They want something very obvious and fancy on a few hand-picked images for a 5 minute talk. They aren’t necessarily trying to build general-purpose tools for artists.
Real photographers use all kinds of trickery to control contrast and dynamic range. Ansel Adams tweaked the hell out of his photographs at every stage from capture to print, using pre-exposed negatives, non-standard chemistry timings, contrast-adjusting masks sandwiched with negatives, tons of dodging and burning, etc.