Photographic Tone Reproduction

Abstract

A classic photographic task is the mapping of the potentially high dynamic range of real world luminances to the low dynamic range of the photographic print. This tone reproduction problem is also faced by computer graphics practitioners who must map digital images to a low dynamic range print or screen. The work presented in this paper leverages the time-tested techniques of photographic practice to develop a new tone reproduction operator. In particular, we use and extend the techniques developed by Ansel Adams to deal with digital images. The resulting algorithm is simple and is shown to produce good results for the wide variety of images that we have tested.

Resources

Full paper in PDF format.
High and low dynamic range images compressed with our photographic tonemapping operator.
Source code compiles on SGI workstations.
High dynamic range data in Radiance rgbe format.

HDR Shop plug-in

A free HDR Shop plug-in, authored by Greg Zuro and published by Greg Downing, is now available. Paul Debevec's HDR Shop is an image processing system design to work with high dynamic range images.

Authors

Erik Reinhard, University of Central Florida
Mike Stark, University of Utah
Peter Shirley, University of Utah
James Ferwerda Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University

Erratum

Equation 1 in the paper is wrong. The division by N should be placed before the summation, not outside the exponentiation. Note that the source code, and hence all results in the paper, are still correct.

Acknowledgments

Many researchers have made their high dynamic range images and/or their tone mapping software available, and without that help our comparisons would have been impossible. This work was supported by NSF grants 89-20219, 95-23483, 97-96136, 97-31859, 98-18344, 99-77218, 99-78099, EIA-8920219 and by the DOE AVTC/VIEWS.