Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production: Film Simulation for Video Games

In video games, High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering is commonly used and allows us to render more photo-realistic looking images. HDR rendering uses a tone-mapping process to achieve a Low Dynamic Range (LDR) rendering result for a display. The process compresses or clamps HDR color information to fit LDR devices which typically have an 8-bit color resolution. There are a lot of tone-mapping algorithms, however, typical ones are designed for compressing HDR color information efficiently and may leave the viewer artistically unsatisfied. On the other hand, in photography, film is used to record an image from the real world, which can be thought of as tone-mapping from a computer graphics point of view. Therefore, we think of film as a standard for tone-mapping because film manufacturing engineers have been trying to improve the quality of film to reproduce high fidelity or memory colors.