Photographic Tone Reproduction for Digital Images Erik Reinhard, Mike Stark, Peter Shirley and Jim Ferwerda

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.

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.

Erik Reinhard, University of Utah
Mike Stark, University of Utah
Peter Shirley, University of Utah
Jim Ferwerda Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University

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.