https://github.com/andreavolpato/spektrafilm/tree/dev

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

[1] https://darktable.org

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280

Kind of stoked to see this release even though I've transitioned to a 100% open source photo workflow on Linux now.

IMO, most exciting developments in photo editing today happens in open source. But this is really something.

I think this ended up on the front page because people instinctively upvoted Zed-something.

[1] https://viva.systems/designer/

Do we have to think? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)

Did they explain the reasoning?

https://www.cultofmac.com/how-to/exchange-your-cracked-macbo...

Think about standing outside on a sunny day. The sunlit pavement might be tens of thousands of times brighter than the shadow under a tree. Look up at a bright cloud and then glance into a shaded doorway. Your eyes can still make out detail in both. The dynamic range of the real world the ratio between the darkest and brightest things present at the same time is enormous.

Cameras struggle with this. When you take a photo, the camera can't always capture both the bright sky and the dark ground correctly at the same time. Either the sky blows out to white or the shadows become black. That limitation is why HDR photography and exposure bracketing exists.

Even modern digital cameras still capture a far wider range of brightness than most displays can show. That's why we use tone mappers in photography and video. Tone mapping compresses the huge brightness range captured by the camera so it can fit onto a display that only has a tiny slice of that range.

So screens are not "more contrasty" than reality. They're the opposite. Displays are a bottleneck that force a very wide real world brightness range into something much smaller.

Your eyes are also incredibly good at adapting. If you look at a white page of paper in sunlight and then look at black ink on it, the contrast between the two is extremely strong. Snow in sunlight next to a dark rock is another example. Nature is full of intense light and dark differences.

When web developers avoid strong contrast because it feels "unnatural", they're misunderstanding the physics and the biology. High contrast between text and background isn't artificial at all. It's actually closer to how humans evolved to see clearly: dark shapes against bright surfaces or bright shapes against dark ones.

The real ergonomic problem with screens usually isn't contrast between text and background. It's screen brightness relative to the environment. Many people run their monitors far brighter than the room around them. If a screen is glowing like a light source in a dim room, the whole display becomes visually harsh and fatiguing. In ergonomics, the usual advice is to match the screen's brightness to the surrounding lighting so the display feels like part of the environment rather than a flashlight in your face.

When display brightness is set appropriately, strong text contrast simply improves legibility. The discomfort people blame on "too much contrast" is often just a monitor that's set far brighter than it should be. Reality itself contains vastly wider brightness differences than any display, so high contrast text isn't unnatural at all. It's a practical way to make information clear within the limited dynamic range that screens can actually show.

It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071986

Points: 3

# Comments: 1