Processing RAWs for HDR displays in Darktable

[kmilos]

@Entropy512

One “hack” I’ve sometimes used is to map whatever the peak luminance of the transfer function is to a linear value of 1.0, which makes it play nicer with “non-HDR-aware” pipelines.

For example, dividing everything in the HLG standard by 12. (I think peak luminance is “12.0”) - which makes it behave just like how most cameras handle these modes anyway - peak luminance maps to sensor clip point.

I tried something similar here, just targeting mid-gray. It looks good on SDR display, but I guess still sacrifices quite a bit of highlights since there is clipping above 1.0, and only 1.36 EV was “recovered” (i.e., the peak doesn’t quite get up to 12…).