Re: Discuss HDR at CSS WG next week ?

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:25 AM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:

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>
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
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>>
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>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:41 AM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 9:58 AM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 7:35 AM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> > On Sep 14, 2016, at 10:05 PM, Rossen Atanassov <
>>>>>> Rossen.Atanassov@microsoft.com> wrote:
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> >> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 16:53:53, Mark Watson wrote:
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> I have some use-cases and issues / questions related to High
>>>>>> Dynamic Range
>>>>>> >> graphics / images and how they could be supported in CSS. I
>>>>>> wondered if this
>>>>>> >> topic was or could be on the agenda for next week ?
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Are you referring to our TPAC agenda? If so, we don't have the
>>>>>> topic scheduled and looking through everything we have it is doubtful we
>>>>>> could get to it.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Could you summarize your proposal? Is this something proposed at
>>>>>> WICG already?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, TPAC. I've raised the issue of HDR a few times on the CSS list,
>>>>>> but with no real response. We had a breakout at TPAC last year, but no
>>>>>> one from CSS attended. I imagine that is because people do not yet
>>>>>> have real hardware / platform APIs with which to play with this
>>>>>> functionality. Those will soon be available, so it seemed good timing
>>>>>> to raise it again and explain the various problems.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I only have problems, not a proposal. The basic problem (as I
>>>>>> understand it) is that with HDR displays, users are unlikely to want
>>>>>> the peak white for regular sRGB to map to the peak luminance of the
>>>>>> display. That would make desktops blindingly bright. So there needs to
>>>>>> be a way for pages to signal when they are providing data in the sRGB
>>>>>> luminance space (where peak white is what the user has set as a
>>>>>> comfortable luminance for their desktop according to current ambient
>>>>>> light) and when they are providing data in a different luminance
>>>>>> space, where peak white is brighter (exactly how bright is one of he
>>>>>> questions to be answered.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> This is defined in the CSS color spec [1]. If no profile is provided,
>>>>> peak white is peak sRGB white.
>>>>> The fact that you get blindingly white is a browser bug. (I believe
>>>>> only Safari does this right today)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ​I think there is a mis-understanding here and that is why I think the
>>>> issue deserves discussion.
>>>>
>>>> As far as I can tell, [1] is entirely about color gamut. Whilst there
>>>> are many ways to identify colors, the specification does not seem to treat
>>>> dynamic ​range. The section you reference regarding profiles, says "Others
>>>> are more human-friendly to write and understand, *and are converted to
>>>> an sRGB color by CSS*".
>>>>
>>>> sRGB peak white will appear at the brightness the user prefers for
>>>> their environment (because most of the graphics they see are sRGB and they
>>>> will adjust the brightness control on their display).
>>>>
>>>> My point is that for capable displays, it should be possible to make
>>>> graphics brighter than that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, you can by either providing an image with an embedded profile that
>>> has a higher gamut than sRGB, or by specifying a CSS color [1] with an HDR
>>> profile.
>>>
>>
>> ​Could you give an example of how you would specify an HDR profile with
>> CSS ?​ For example, if I wanted some white text that was twice as bright as
>> sRGB(255,255,255) text ? I don't see that in the css-color specification.
>>
>
> Dean wrote a blog about this: https://webkit.org/blog/
> 6682/improving-color-on-the-web/
>

​This is great, but it is all about gamut alone.​

I don't know what profile is twice as bright as sRGB, but color(rec2020 255
> 255 255) would be brighter than rgb(255, 255, 255)
>

​Why would you think that ?

In video, at least, the Rec.2020 color space is used for both SDR and HDR,
with a variety of transfer functions. I don't know if Rec.2020 defines a
default transfer function, but if it does it is likely a gamma function
like sRGB, which is scene-referred.

Someone has to decide, or signal, how the luminance range of that 2020 data
relates to the luminance range of sRGB data. It's not implied by the color
profile alone.


>
>> Note that I am not talking about a wider gamut - that seems to be well
>> covered - but a different dynamic range (i.e. a larger color volume, not
>> just larger color gamut).
>>
>
> What do you mean by "color volume". Are you talking about higher bit
> depths for compositing?
>

​No, but higher bit depths are important too.

As far as I can tell, CSS and ICC profiles deal with color gamut: subspaces
of the 2-dimensional CIE color space. A color in that space can be
described by two coordinates. An actual pixel color has 3 coordinates and
res​ides in a *color volume*: a three-dimensional space where the
intersection of this space and a plane is the CIE space.

The problem we have can be thought of as a backwards compatibilty one. You
*could* specify luminance on the same scale for all image / graphics data
sources. And, indeed, I expect this is what the graphics plane APIs of all
devices will look like. In that case an RGB pixel in any color space with
linear values ( 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 ) will be rendered display peak luminance (or
close). I believe this is the case with CSS as things stand.

This would support any and all HDR images / graphics, but the problem would
be that peak white in both SDR and HDR data would be rendered the same.
Most importantly, peak white in desktop graphics would be the same as
specular highlights in HDR images.

Since most desktop applications are going to stay sRGB, we need some new
way for authors to specify pixels that are brighter than that.


>
>
>> Those colors are then mapped to the "device" color which usually is the
>>> monitor's colorspace. If you have an HDR monitor and specify an HDR image,
>>> you will get colors that are brighter than sRGB white.
>>>
>>> Safari is already doing this for images so you can try this for yourself
>>> if you have a capable device.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> If you do provide a profile, it will be used to map to the display.
>>>>> Is there a way to embed a profile in a video stream?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ​Here I am not talking about video. But, yes, video metadata specifies
>>>> not only color gamut (primaries) but a transfer function which is used to
>>>> map between encoded luminance and actual luminance and is different for HDR
>>>> and SDR video.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think we need to specify what is done with video. It seems that this
>>> information needs to be used so the browser knows how to manage the video's
>>> colors.
>>> what happens today with video?
>>>
>>
>> ​Well, this is all rather new, so I doubt there is any consistency. On
>> the various devices we have seen which composite sRGB graphics with HDR
>> video it's highly variable. I expect when we see this on devices with
>> desktop-class browsers, the operating system will have made some decision
>> as to what luminance to map sRGB to, relative to the HDR images. I've heard
>> 80 nits. I've also heard of people planning to map sRGB peak white to panel
>> peak white.​
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> To obtain CSS use-cases, imagine first a still image extracted from an
>>>> HDR video, encoded in some still image format which carries HDR metadata
>>>> and which is supported by the browser.
>>>>
>>>> It should be possible to specify in CSS any color+luminance that
>>>> appears in that image. If the video or still image pixels are constrained
>>>> to be no brighter than the sRGB peak white (the luminance the user prefers
>>>> for their desktop), then you will not get any improvement in appearance:
>>>> for example specular highlights in the video / image would be no brighter
>>>> than for an SDR video / image, even though the display may be capable of
>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, extract the transfer function and other information from the video
>>> stream and use it to construct a profile. Then embed that profile in your
>>> still image.
>>>
>>
>> ​What about actually specifying one of those colors in CSS ? So that I
>> can have text or graphics matching ​the colors in the image ?
>>
>
> You can place the profile on your web server,load it with css using
> @color-profile and use the name with the css color property.
>

​Like I said, I don't think the profile is enough, since it is addressing
gamut.​ Certainly, Rec. 2020, for example, does not tell me how much
brighter than sRGB it's peak white should be. In video we have additional
metadata for that.

...Mark


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>
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> If the WICG is the appropriate place to raise these problems, I can do
>>>>>> that, but the experts are in CSS WG so I wondered if there was
>>>>>> interest in learning about these issues.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks ... Mark
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 1: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#color-type
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>> 1: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#icc-colors
>>>
>>>
>>
> 1: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#at-profile
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