Light Matter is a simple image viewer with HDR and wide gamut photo support for Windows. It also supports modern image formats like JPEG XL and AVIF. HDR is supported in JPEG UltraHDR (JPEG with gain maps), JPEG XL, AVID and PNG.

Version 0.0.5 was released recently and it is now published to Microsoft Store.

Light Matter is an open-source application, you can find its source on GitHub. And features requests and bug reports are welcome and can be submitted here.

I made a simple HDR brightness checker page. You can use it to check blooming on Mini LED monitors and brightness capabilities of OLED screens at different ABL levels. Alternatively you can use it to get CSS values for HDR colours in Display P3 colour space. Or just play around :)

Right now it only works in Chromium based browsers, and you, obviously, need an HDR capable screen.

HDR is enabled with an HDR image trick as described here, but instead of loading an external image, it is inlined inside HTML using data protocol. If you want to enable HDR CSS for your own page, add the following HTML snippet into your wb page:

<img
  src="data:image/jpeg;base64,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">

Please note that this is a 1x1 image and it MUST BE VISIBLE. If you hide the image with CSS or remove it from DOM tree, Chrome will switch back to SDR rendering.

Late last year I’ve bought my first HDR capable monitor for my PC and got interested in HDR photography. Not the fake multi-exposure tone mapping into SDR, but proper HDR with DCI-P3 wide colour gamut and high brightness. Just like our mobile phones take photos for years now.

HDR photography is very new and there’s not much information about it yet. Thankfully, Greg Benz have compiled everything he knows on the topic and it was a very helpful reading.

Another issue is RAW processing. Adobe Lightroom is the only RAW processing software capable of HDR at the moment, and if you don’t like it or don’t use it for whatever reason then you’re out of luck. Most gallery and cataloguing apps don’t support HDR either. The best way to share your HDR work right now is to use Instagram.

With that said, I went for a walk to Richmond Park in London on a bit gloomy autumn day with my camera and took some shots. After some trial and error I think I managed to produce a few HDR photos which look OK. And started working on a small open source gallery generator with HDR support (that’s still a work in progress).

Please enjoy Richmond Park in HDR while I’m working on the gallery :)