Capturing screenshots in HDR games? *spawn*

please explain. Tell me. To understand.
Let's say that you are colour blind your whole life. You cannot see the colour purple. It doesn't matter how many different ways the colour purple is captured, you will never be able to see it until you are given a technology that allows you to visually see purple.

Like a pair of glasses for colour blind people would do.

That's like HDR.

If that analogy doesn't work. Think about music then.

You're whole life you can hear frequencies from 20Hz to ~20KHz. But when you listen to music on your ear phones the phones only have frequency response of 40Hz-16KHz. So aside from real life, you've never heard music close to your maximum hearing range.

And it doesn't matter how great the source of the music is, it doesn't matter if it's vinyl or digital or analog or has musical tons above your hearing range, because as long as you listen to music with those lower range ear phones that's all you will ever hear.

HDR is that. HDR increases the range in which you can see. You need an HDR TV to see HDR.
 
Let's say that you are colour blind your whole life. You cannot see the colour purple. It doesn't matter how many different ways the colour purple is captured, you will never be able to see it until you are given a technology that allows you to visually see purple.

Like a pair of glasses for colour blind people would do.

That's like HDR.

If that analogy doesn't work. Think about music then.

You're whole life you can hear frequencies from 20Hz to ~20KHz. But when you listen to music on your ear phones the phones only have frequency response of 40Hz-16KHz. So aside from real life, you've never heard music close to your maximum hearing range.

And it doesn't matter how great the source of the music is, it doesn't matter if it's vinyl or digital or analog or has musical tons above your hearing range, because as long as you listen to music with those lower range ear phones that's all you will ever hear.

HDR is that. HDR increases the range in which you can see. You need an HDR TV to see HDR.
thanks for the thoroughly detailed explanation. So a still photo can't capture the difference in a game connected to 2 different screens -side by side, one with HDR the other without HDR- and you need to actually see HDR with your own eyes in real time, right?
 
thanks for the thoroughly detailed explanation. So a still photo can't capture the difference in a game connected to 2 different screens -side by side, one with HDR the other without HDR- and you need to actually see HDR with your own eyes in real time, right?

Another explanation: viewing color screenshots on black-and-white displays.
 
thanks for the thoroughly detailed explanation. So a still photo can't capture the difference in a game connected to 2 different screens -side by side, one with HDR the other without HDR- and you need to actually see HDR with your own eyes in real time, right?
It'll show a difference but not how it looks in person. If you take a photo of a bright, sunny day and display it on a normal monitor, it's not bright to the eyes. So even taking an HDR photo of an HDR display, once you display that on a standard range display it'll lose its HDR. Not to mention off-screen photos don't look much like the real game anyway.

An actual HDR data dump and image format is required. I see these exist but aren't standard. JPEG XR looks a good candidate with support native in Windows 10 - they just need to update the screen-grab APIs to support HDR (if they haven't already).
 
thanks for the thoroughly detailed explanation. So a still photo can't capture the difference in a game connected to 2 different screens -side by side, one with HDR the other without HDR- and you need to actually see HDR with your own eyes in real time, right?

Camera "HDR" is usually a combination of an under exposed image and an overexposed image to resolve detail in bright areas and also in dark. Fundamentally it's still only showing information on the same scale, a very flat scale designed to print where luminance of a pixel is not needed.

The image only needs the colour of a pixel not it's brightness, and x and a y I guess, video has luminance Sona z axis and people talk of colour volume of a display this is all that combined.

In video HDR expands the colour range that can be described is increased over the old standard to closer that of photography I believe, and a massive increase in the luminance possible of the pixels within. A film camera to film HDR needs to capture 16 odd different exposures at the same time to create the content.

There is a very detailed guide to HDR and its production pipeline which although long is well worth a read, it details the formats as well as display technology and dispelled some common misconceptions

http://hometheaterhifi.com/technica...n-dynamic-range-resolution-color-calibration/
 
Camera "HDR" is usually a combination of an under exposed image and an overexposed image to resolve detail in bright areas and also in dark. Fundamentally it's still only showing information on the same scale, a very flat scale designed to print where luminance of a pixel is not needed.

The image only needs the colour of a pixel not it's brightness, and x and a y I guess, video has luminance Sona z axis and people talk of colour volume of a display this is all that combined.

In video HDR expands the colour range that can be described is increased over the old standard to closer that of photography I believe, and a massive increase in the luminance possible of the pixels within. A film camera to film HDR needs to capture 16 odd different exposures at the same time to create the content.

There is a very detailed guide to HDR and its production pipeline which although long is well worth a read, it details the formats as well as display technology and dispelled some common misconceptions

http://hometheaterhifi.com/technica...n-dynamic-range-resolution-color-calibration/
excellent read. Thanks for sharing. I've been reading it these days and while I didn't have internet for a couple of days I had loaded the pages already and kept the PC in sleep mode so I gave it a thorough read.
 
It'll show a difference but not how it looks in person. If you take a photo of a bright, sunny day and display it on a normal monitor, it's not bright to the eyes. So even taking an HDR photo of an HDR display, once you display that on a standard range display it'll lose its HDR. Not to mention off-screen photos don't look much like the real game anyway.

An actual HDR data dump and image format is required. I see these exist but aren't standard. JPEG XR looks a good candidate with support native in Windows 10 - they just need to update the screen-grab APIs to support HDR (if they haven't already).
well, now you can take a HDR screengrab using Xbox Game Bar, which is enabled with the big circular button of the Xbox One gamepad -or with Windows key + G-. I explain it in more detail here; https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/curved-monitors-with-high-hz.61542/page-3

I managed to capture the SDR image, easy as pie as always- Snipping Tool or Snip & Sketch, Lightshot, etc, will do.

The aforementioned tools won't capture HDR, and the image is going to look totally destroyed. I didnt know what was happening at first until I tried 5 times and got the same result every time -initially thought the capture tools were bugged so I tried several-.

With the Xbox tool I got the HDR equivalent. There is also a .jxr file in the same folder where I got the HDR image.

SDR image
MGyithF.png


HDR equivalent -captured with Xbox Game Bar-

jn1ShOA.png


What a game changer HDR is.

With RT, DLSS, 100Hz+ and HDR, on a 1440p screen -4k is meh-, overall use and gaming hits another dimension. :mrgreen: Too bad I dont have a RT capable GPU, but still.., good times. :)

I got the images from the video below. Images with super black backgrounds and lots of colour and light would be even more describing. But it's what I got and I feel tired to find other images and fiddling with the screen.

 
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I don't think it's valid to just take printscreens of HDR content. Does the clipboard save images with HDR?
 
I don't think it's valid to just take printscreens of HDR content. Does the clipboard save images with HDR?
no, it doesnt. Everytime I tried, just like with the snipping tool and similar, the picture just look as if it was destroyed or someone used the eraser on most of the screengrab.

I took it with this utility -Windows key + G or big button with the X on the xb1 gamepad- and clicked on that button to the top left. If the display is in HDR mode, it saves the metadata to some .jxr file or something like that, then you can look at it in SDR mode without artifacts or anything:

RIp0wph.png
 
So it's tone mapped into sdr
nice read, can someone point me to well mastered HDR content, because so far I've seen in my light controled room was overly bright HDR.

I suppose Dolby Vision is the tightest controlled format, watching that should be as close to an intended as possible.

The quality of authoring if probably equal or better to TV specific implementation. Or that's the impression I get, especially for hdr10.

Games often have basic configuration controls to dial it in to your TV and preferences. GT on the PS4 is supposed to look very natural and a great showing for HDR, DF have a good video talking about stand out games.

 
Games often have basic configuration controls to dial it in to your TV and preferences. GT on the PS4 is supposed to look very natural and a great showing for HDR

GTS have slider to set maximum brightness, it's not about preference more about display capabilities. HDR in GTS looks better than SDR only because they choosed to not tone map well into SDR, unfortunatelly I can't get myself to play in HDR, it's awfully bright for me.

I can demonstrate bad SDR tone mapping in Gran Turismo Sport with simple screenshots taken with PS4 share function which tone map HDR into SDR on system level.

SDR (look at how dark dashboard is)
GTSSDR.jpg


HDR output tonemapped to SDR by PS4 (dashboard is more visible)
GTSHDR.jpg


and this is how I would do it to make that detailed dashboard nicely visible (crude MS paint job)
GTSmockup.jpg
 
nice read, can someone point me to well mastered HDR content, because so far I've seen in my light controled room was overly bright HDR.
Metro Exodus -pc version, consoles should be about the same- has one of the best implementations. The best I've seen yet.

A mate of mine told me that you can tone down HDR in some consoles. I mean, it is going to be overly bright if it is set to.... say 1000 nits on a HDR600, HDR500, HDR400 screen.

In that sense Redout was a bit bitchy to edit, since I dont have a HDR1000 screen, but I edited this file C:\Users\<Your-Username>\AppData\Local\redout\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\GameUserSettings.ini and set it to 500 nits instead of the default 1000.

At the default level, the game was so bright that white "removed" the letters surrounding it from the screen. I could barely see some menus in the game, and the silver trophy was invisible. :mrgreen:
 
So it's tone mapped into sdr


I suppose Dolby Vision is the tightest controlled format, watching that should be as close to an intended as possible.

The quality of authoring if probably equal or better to TV specific implementation. Or that's the impression I get, especially for hdr10.

Games often have basic configuration controls to dial it in to your TV and preferences. GT on the PS4 is supposed to look very natural and a great showing for HDR, DF have a good video talking about stand out games.

missed that video before, thanks for sharing. It's a good video to test HDR on and HDR off on your screen. HDR support on PC is still in its infancy compared to consoles.
 
it's quite disappointing that Halo Reach has a line in the ini files to enable HDR but it doesn't work. If it was another title... But Halo Reach.... It has the HDR built in, even in the original version. It was primarily made with it in mind.

I still remember all the fuss about the use of the eDRAM to offer the best possible image with HDR both in Halo Reach and Halo 3, and in fact they say it was the main reason both games were under HD.

The explosions even on the TVs and monitors of the time looked super bright and the effect lingered for a while.
 
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