Color appearance in high-dynamic-range imaging

When viewing images on a monitor, we are adapted to the lighting conditions of our viewing environment as well as the monitor itself, which can be very different from the lighting conditions in which the images were taken. As a result, our perception of these photographs depends directly on the environment in which they are displayed. For high-dynamic-range images, the disconnect in the perception of scene and viewing environments is potentially much larger than in conventional film and photography. To prepare an image for display, luminance compression alone is therefore not sufficient. We propose to augment current tone reproduction operators with the application of color appearance models as an independent preprocessing step to preserve chromatic appearance across scene and display environments. The method is independent of any specific tone reproduction operator and color appearance model (CAM) so that for each application the most suitable tone reproduction operator and CAM can be selected. © 2006 SPIE and IS&T. DOI: 10.1117/1.2238891