About

HDRHTML is a technique for embedding an interactive multi-exposure viewer of HDR images in web pages. The embedded HDRHTML viewer can look like this:

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Image © HDR-VFX, LLC 2008, sample from the SIBL library.

See more examples in the HDR image gallery.

How to use it?

pfstools 1.8 and newer contains a new command pfsouthdrhtml that can generate HTML pages with HDR HTML viewer:

pfsin image.hdr | pfsouthdrhtml webpage.html
See the manual page of pfsouthdrhtml for more details.

You can also download a matlab toolkit that can do the same, but the code is easier to read if you would like to reproduce the algorithm. The toolkit contains also all look-up-tables used by the algorithm.

How does it work?

In short: Multiple exposures are encoded as a combination of several basis images, which are stacked together and displayed with different opacity values. The combination of such basis images yields the resulting exposure image. An interface based on JavaScript callback functions provides control over exposure setting. The technique allows to encode a series of 24 or more exposure images using only 3 basis images, with almost visible image differences.

More details can be found in a paper:

Visualizing High Dynamic Range Images in a Web Browser
Rafał Mantiuk and Wolfgang Heidrich
In: Journal of Graphics Tools (in printing), 2009.
[pre-print PDF]

License and copyright

You are free to generate web pages with HTML HDR viewer. Please do not remove the help popup window and the link that should point to this web page. The toolkit for generating pages is under the GPL. If you find this little tool helpful in your research project, please cite our paper.