👁️ HDR standards and formats:🖥️ HDR software:
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This white paper, written by Tania Pouli (a specialist in image and HDR video processing), explores the challenges and solutions related to SDR to HDR conversion in the context of content creation. It highlights current technical obstacles and presents an approach through the LumiMakr tool.
Introduction
The new UHD format introduces video quality enhancements beyond just the image resolution. One of the most impactful ones is high dynamic range (HDR) imaging: brighter and darker details, better contrast and more realistic and immersive experiences. For a smooth transition to UHD and to enhance already existing content, conversions that can go between SDR (standard dynamic range) and HDR are key.
LumiMakr offers a lightweight, robust answer to the SDR-HDR conversion challenge for creator and semi-professional workflows. With HDR becoming increasingly important across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, content creators face significant challenges accessing high-quality, affordable HDR conversion tools. LumiMakr aims to fill that gap with a plugin designed for agility, quality, and ease of use.
The Challenges with HDR Conversion
HDR enables richer highlights, deeper shadows, and an expanded color gamut. Converting SDR content to HDR however brings about several challenges.
The devil is in the details:
As the SDR format is more limited, details in SDR content are often lost or compressed in shadow and highlight areas. Bright areas such as highlights, or light sources may also be clipped. At the opposite end of the dynamic range, details in dark areas can be suppressed or masked by sensor noise.
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The risk of boosting:
Most HDR conversions attempt to mimic the lighting of native HDR content by boosting highlight regions. Certain methods even rely on AI techniques to reconstruct clipped highlight areas. However, by overly boosting bright areas, details in dark areas can appear darker than they were in the original SDR, particularly if they are near bright areas.
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Artifacts:
A common challenge arises when SDR images contain artifacts such as noise (sensor noise, film grain) or compression artifacts. Converting to HDR tends to stretch at least part of the dynamic range, meaning that these artifacts are likely to become more prominent.
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Creative control:
While several solutions have been developed to address SDR to HDR conversions in a broadcasting, streaming or similar professional applications, they require specialized and very performant hardware. As such, they do not necessarily address the needs of content creators targeting social media, or independent videographers, nor do they correspond to their typical workflows. To answer to the needs of content creators, a conversion solution needs to handle the above challenges gracefully, while offering intuitive creative controls.
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LumiMakr’s Approach
LumiMakr's HDR conversion was designed to strike a balance between creative flexibility and ease of use. The chosen approach allows for simple controls of tone style parameters, while creating HDR videos and images compatible with current practices and standards.
Artifact-aware processing pipeline:
A key design goal was to suppress noise and compression artifacts typically present in SDR footage. Through a noise isolation and cleaning process the solution creates a solid foundation on which the dynamic range can be expanded. An intelligent filtering approach is used to separate real image information from artifacts. The underlying image stacking process is based on a patent-protected technology, ensuring both originality and robustness.
Adaptive tone-mapping:
Using the expertise built through the development of the Photomatix solution, one of the pioneering tools in HDR photography, adaptive tone mapping tools have been developed to offer creative control over the final stylistic mapping.
HDR standards:
Videos can be exported in the widely adopted PQ and HLG standards, through an accurate color management pipeline.
Using this process, a cleaner video is created, allowing us to expand the dynamic range to HDR without the risk of amplifying artifacts , a common issue with many HDR conversion solutions. Creative controls offer an intuitive way to manage the style of the final image. An example result can be seen in the following figure
Figure 1: Example HDR result using the LumiMakr plugin. Almost invisible details in the dark cliffs are enhanced, while the overall look of the video is respected, when no specific stylization is applied.
Addressing Real Workflows
HDR conversions can be computationally heavy. To improve performance, we take advantage of several optimizations. While the core processing can run on both CPU and GPU, key operations necessary in the artifact-aware processing part of our solution as well as for the tone mapping are optimized for parallel processing, maximizing performance on modern multi-core hardware.
The conversion can be used as a DaVinci Resolve OFX plugin (see Figure 2), leveraging Resolve’s image buffer API for efficient frame access and native GPU pipeline compatibility. Compatible with Resolve’s native color grading tools, the LumiMakr plugin can naturally integrate in a post-production pipeline for content creators.
Figure 2: The LumiMakr plugin interface within DaVinci Resolve.
Conclusion
HDR has the potential to significantly improve visual experiences, but it also brings about several challenges. HDR conversions are one important part of the puzzle, simplifying the transition towards this new format.
The LumiMakr conversion offers an intuitive approach for creating HDR content, adapted to the workflows of content creators and semi-professional users. A patent-protected image processing algorithm takes advantage of information already present in the video to reduce the visibility of noise and artifacts, producing a clean HDR version. To create custom artistic styles, clear and flexible tone mapping controls are offered.
Ongoing developments at LumiMakr focus on performance enhancements, stylistic flexibility, and targeted use of AI techniques. Some planned areas of development include:
Expanded Style Controls:
New controls will allow users to achieve more complex visual styles with a more precise control of details.
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AI Integration:
the predictive power of recent AI techniques could help learn use style preferences, automatically suggest tone parameters depending on the scene, or even reconstruct clipped highlights.
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As HDR adoption continues to grow across platforms and devices, practical, high-quality conversion tools like LumiMakr will be essential. Our goal is to support creators with technology that balances visual quality, reliability, and creative freedom—without requiring specialized infrastructure or opaque processing chains.
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