How do your eyes not hurt from HDR?

O

OpenSource Ghost

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2022
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100cd/m^2 - 120cd/m^2 is pleasant, but anything above that is overkill for office work... or gaming... or watching films. Or perhaps my eyes just suck at tolerating heavy brightness?
 
A good display calibrated to the room and lighting conditions. Having to squint at certain on screen elements that I would squint from in real life is how I know its working. :p
 
criccio said:
A good display calibrated to the room and lighting conditions. Having to squint at certain on screen elements that I would squint from in real life is how I know its working. :p
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Yes and from education years ago, advised brightness is about 100-120cd/m^2 for comfort. Based on that criteria, you can't have eye comfort with HDR.
 
OpenSource Ghost said:
Yes and from education years ago, advised brightness is about 100-120cd/m^2 for comfort. Based on that criteria, you can't have eye comfort with HDR.
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That's the same kind of advice you get about TV and monitor sizes. People calculate optimal size based on room size and distance from the display. None of it is really all that accurate. None of that is a substitute for actual hands on experience.
 
I'd be curious how you have the display configured and even which one it is. Are you using a monitor or TV? If being used with a PC, are you concerned about desktop brightness? If so in HDR mode, make use of the SDR content slider. I run in HDR mode all the time but have the SDR brightness slider at 10 (out of 100) with my LG C2. (frankly, 0 is fine too)
 
Not sure who would bother to use HDR for office work, that doesn't make much sense to me. HDR movies is great, HDR games sucked at first but have gotten much better over time. Seems like the oldest HDR games just think that HDR = maximum brightness so they were just pumping up brightness to the point that your screen is now operating in torch mode. More HDR games that I played recently are proper where only what needs to be bright is actually bright (sun, lamps, fire, etc.) rather than just making the entire scene bright overall.
 
MistaSparkul said:
Not sure who would bother to use HDR for office work, that doesn't make much sense to me. HDR movies is great, HDR games sucked at first but have gotten much better over time. Seems like the oldest HDR games just think that HDR = maximum brightness so they were just pumping up brightness to the point that your screen is now operating in torch mode. More HDR games that I played recently are proper where only what needs to be bright is actually bright (sun, lamps, fire, etc.) rather than just making the entire scene bright overall.
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And that's not even the real benefit. Its in the name, the dynamic range.
 
pendragon1 said:
lol. are you even using an hdr display? every one i have touched has brightness control.
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He's correct, properly mastered HDR material should be able to assign the appropriate brightness values for each individual pixels, along with the display being able to track it. That's why in HDR mode contrast/pixel brightness should be maxed.
 
I use HDR full-time on my mini-led QN90B.

I have adaptive brightness 🔆 on at all times.

Sometimes I have it as low as 1% and sometimes I have it as high as 100% max. Depends on the ambient room lighting during the day or late night.

Either way HDR is always on and looks awesome.
 
tongshadow said:
He's correct, properly mastered HDR material should be able to assign the appropriate brightness values for each individual pixels, along with the display being able to track it. That's why in HDR mode contrast/pixel brightness should be maxed.
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i didnt say otherwise. he said he cant adjust brightness. want to address that?
my tv has two ways to do it, brightness and backlight.
 
This is where I'm actually grateful for the aggressive adaptive brightness on my OLED. Small highlights at (in-game) night/indoors pop, but the (in-game) daytime brightness is toned-down and doesn't blast my eyes out in a dark room. Sure, dynamic range is reduced, but I'll take that tradeoff.

I don't see where OP mentioned monitor model... There should be adjustments for brightness and peak brightness available.
 
improwise said:
Have you ever been outside and if so, did it result in your eyes hurting?
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I have, and sometimes it did.

Seriously, the OP's question is reasonable. I don't know why some here is acting like he's trying to take their HDR screens away from them. :LOL: As someone who has never used a HDR screen and is usually running my SDR monitors at like 10 % brightness, I've wondered the same thing. From the replies so far I gather that people who like HDR prefers more realistic light levels even if it leads to some eye discomfort. Is that correct?
 
Actually sounds like you might have a light sensitivity that you just are going to have to deal with. Turning down brightness or even getting a very weak ND filter to cover your screen can do this as well if you cant turn it down. Eye strain helping glasses may be good to try as well.
 
bitnick said:
I have, and sometimes it did.

Seriously, the OP's question is reasonable. I don't know why some here is acting like he's trying to take their HDR screens away from them. :LOL: As someone who has never used a HDR screen and is usually running my SDR monitors at like 10 % brightness, I've wondered the same thing. From the replies so far I gather that people who like HDR prefers more realistic light levels even if it leads to some eye discomfort. Is that correct?
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Unless you have light sensitivity, HDR monitors today don't get anywhere near bright enough to be anywhere close to what you see when you poke your head out of the door on a bright summer day.

Your eyes are able to adapt to the brightness in a moment.
 
kasakka said:
Unless you have light sensitivity, HDR monitors today don't get anywhere near bright enough to be anywhere close to what you see when you poke your head out of the door on a bright summer day.

Your eyes are able to adapt to the brightness in a moment.
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It’s cloudy and foggy here where I am right now and the light that comes in the windows is still lighting my whole house, my monitor surely isn’t outshining it lol.
 
Darunion said:
It’s cloudy and foggy here where I am right now and the light that comes in the windows is still lighting my whole house, my monitor surely isn’t outshining it lol.
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Always interesting to follow an argumentation between people that seem to agree with each other :)
 
HDR isn't for office work, it's for gaming/movies where it's often really dark with bursts of brightness. The point is to have a large range between black and white, so yeah, sometimes it's gonna be really bright.
 
So depends on the content. Good HDR content tends to have bright highlights, but not actually be a whole lot brighter total than an SDR scene, at least not for long. As an example from some analysis screenshots I took on another thread, there's a scene in Hogwarts Legacy that's calling for 1860 nits of output, which on my display comes out to like 1700... but the scene itself is pretty dark, it is only an average level of 9.6 nits. Or a fairly bright outdoor scene in Jedi Survivor that has peaks of 1112, but an average of only 30.8.

Basically the really high brightness levels generally only get used as bright highlights, not as a full screen kind of thing. Net effect is that it doesn't end up being an issue on the eyes, when done well. It looks, well, like thing in real life where there will be a bright glint on something, or a lightbulb itself will be much brighter than the surrounding room. They don't go high APL all the time.

As a practical matter, they can't, at least with OLEDs being the major display tech out there. Many OLEDs cap out at APLs under 200 nits so if you call for more than that, they will just remap the brightness down because they physically can't display it. Only those of us with certain MiniLED monitors can actually have full screen, high APL scenes and as such few things try it.

For those that do, like No Man's Sky, which in its mislabeled HDR400 mode is perfectly happy to ask your monitor to do peaks of 2100 nits with full screen brightness over 800 nits. That does get to be too much when playing, and I actually stock a tone mapping curve on it to bring it down. However its an anomaly, with no real HDR grading, not how most games/movies are.
 
OpenSource Ghost said:
100cd/m^2 - 120cd/m^2 is pleasant, but anything above that is overkill for office work... or gaming... or watching films. Or perhaps my eyes just suck at tolerating heavy brightness?
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Because HDR is not the same thing as if you were maxing out the brightness of your SDR screen. Doing the latter pushes up the brightness of everything, from whites to dark greys and makes everything look uncomfortably bright. With HDR the maxed out the brightness (which they are by default) only means you are using the full capability of the screen, how bright the screen CAN show when something calls for it. The average brightness of the screen stays the same that the movie and game is mastered to, which may be either dark or bright depending on the scene and so on. For office work and desktop use on Windows there is a slider in HDR settings where you can set the desired brightness of SDR content and you can set it as dark as you want but this has no effect on HDR content, that is all up to the artist.
 
MaZa said:
Because HDR is not the same thing as if you were maxing out the brightness of your SDR screen. Doing the latter pushes up the brightness of everything, from whites to dark greys and makes everything look uncomfortably bright. With HDR the maxed out the brightness (which they are by default) only means you are using the full capability of the screen, how bright the screen CAN show when something calls for it. The average brightness of the screen stays the same that the movie and game is mastered to, which may be either dark or bright depending on the scene and so on. For office work and desktop use on Windows there is a slider in HDR settings where you can set the desired brightness of SDR content and you can set it as dark as you want but this has no effect on HDR content, that is all up to the artist.
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Indeed! Good HDR implementations should only make bright elements bright, while leaving everything else at more "normal" levels. Some older HDR games that I played just ended up making HDR a torch mode and overbrightened the entire picture as a whole, and when I had my Acer X27 which is capable of sustained 700 nits full field, that was SUPER uncomfortable to view. I found it more comfortable to play on my OLED at the time because the high APL brightness was a lot lower so it was simply more comfortable for viewing those bad HDR games. HDR games these days have gotten much better implementations though so this isn't too much of an issue nowadays.
 
MaZa said:
For office work and desktop use on Windows there is a slider in HDR settings where you can set the desired brightness of SDR content and you can set it as dark as you want but this has no effect on HDR content, that is all up to the artist.
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That's pretty nice, might need to get an HDR monitor just to test that out. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's screen elements (or entire websites) that are bright like the sun.
 
tongshadow
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you can still turn it down, or even turn down the backlight.
 
pendragon1 said:
tongshadow
View attachment 640150
you can still turn it down, or even turn down the backlight.
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Depends on the screen. On the PG32UQX, you can't actually. It operates in true, by the spec, HGIG mode and brightness in HDR is fixed. However not all screens are like that, my S95B TV will let you turn down brightness, and just adjusts it tone mapping.
 
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Sycraft said:
Depends on the screen. On the PG23UQX, you can't actually. It operates in true, by the spec, HGIG mode and brightness in HDR is fixed. However not all screens are like that, my S95B TV will let you turn down brightness, and just adjusts it tone mapping.
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oh, ok. theres no such thing as a 23uqx though, but there is a 32uqx...
can you not adjust the "peak white" in hdr mode? ive never used this one specific model.
1709840396778.png
 
pendragon1 said:
oh, ok. theres no such thing as a 23uqx though, but there is a 32uqx...
can you not adjust the "peak white" in hdr mode? ive never used this one specific model.
View attachment 640155
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Sorry I mistyped it, it is the 32 and no you can't adjust it. It is greyed out in the menu when you are in HDR mode. As I said that is the "correct" behavior by the spec, luminance values are absolute so you display the value specified, up to your limit then clip. It doesn't do any tone mapping that I'm aware of, so you can't change anything.
 
Sycraft said:
Sorry I mistyped it, it is the 32 and no you can't adjust it. It is greyed out in the menu when you are in HDR mode. As I said that is the "correct" behavior by the spec, luminance values are absolute so you display the value specified, up to your limit then clip. It doesn't do any tone mapping that I'm aware of, so you can't change anything.
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ok, well, not all are like that. op never even said he has a hdr display aways...
 
pendragon1 said:
ok, well, not all are like that. op never even said he has a hdr display aways...
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Ya just an FYI for people, it IS a thing with some HDR displays. Now as to how much it matters, depends on the games. A well designed game will let you adjust its own tone mapping, so you can choose how bright you want the game to be on average. However not all do, No Man's Sky is the most egregious for no-adjustment I've personally played but there are others that aren't great.

Edit: I should add that the Lilium shaders for reshare have some pretty nice tone mapping tools so you can adjust a game that won't adjust itself.
 
One setting to rule them all huh?

Do you really try to watch Pacific Rim with the same settings as working with non-HDR optimized office software?

That is madness for the eyes !
Like going to the north pole without sunglases.
Happy blindness headache!

Surely you set the brightness very low for office work and simply use your remote (or dial) to turn it up after work during movie time?

How about the nature of HDR is a wider colour palette?
Brightness is just a part of it.

During office work you simply cheat with windows digital vibrance to skew the colors into HDR "pop" range even with low brightness and contrast settings.

That is the only way that i´ve found to make SDR color-palette-using office software look like HDR.

Me working:
HDR on
digital vibrance 65%
Brightness: 3/50
Contrast: 8/50

Me watching movies:
HDR on
digital vibrance 60%
Brightness: 50/50
Contrast: 50/50

These values are heavily display specific. Don´t copy them.
I´ve posted them only to compare both modes of usage.

ps a remote should be more respected and demanded nowadays. For all HDR capable displays. I don´t care if you call them monitor or tv.
 
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