Steve Yedlin
yedlin.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Steve Yedlin, a cinematographer, publishes demos and essays on color science, resolution, and display technology for filmmakers.
What HN saysHN debates his resolution tests and claim that 4K matters little; commenters also cite his HDR debunking and viewing angle chart.
20HN people shared it
15linked it in comments
7stories submitted
141story points
3 months agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1ON COLOR SCIENCE FOR FILMMAKERS3 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 2Index3 people · first shared 2021
- 3Debunking HDR [video]2 people · 128 points · first shared 2025 · 74 comments on HN
- 4Resolution Demo2 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 5Index2 people · first shared 2018
- 6Index2 people · first shared 2021
- 7ON COLOR SCIENCE FOR FILMMAKERS1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · 5 comments on HN
- 8Debunking HDR1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 9Steve Yedlin, ASC – Director of Photography1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10ResDemoPt21 people · first shared 2025
- 11Index1 people · first shared 2023
- 12MatchLensBlur1 people · first shared 2022
- 13HDR Demo FAQ1 people · first shared 2025
- 14Index1 people · first shared 2023
- 15DispPrepDemoFollowup1 people · first shared 2026
What HN people wrote when they linked it
dbspin · 2026-08-03
That is not what Yedlin's tests show or made an effort to test! His famous first set of comparison tests are about resolution, specifically his opinions about the unimportance of 4K.
I deeply disagree with his conclusion, because he is downgrading a digital image to show it can match the resolution and some of the visual aspects of a 16 print. Which is like putting a filter over a high resolution monitor and then comparing it to SD TV.
But in either case, his work wasn't about whether digital could match the look of any film (it can't).
He has also never released his nuke workflow, although he's more recently productised it to some extent.
Here's his discussion of the footage you linked - https://www.yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/DispPrepDemoFollowup
IndySun · 2026-08-01
I love the OLED entry there. Virtually what I do to all my friends' TV's when I visit.
Yes, it's an annoying thing to do, and they're all "hey, don't change my settings..." at first, but a few seconds later the TV looks better, clearer, brighter.
https://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/OLED_Settings
readbeard · 2019-07-15
The thing is, most people don't actually need 4K.
In fact, I believe most modern films—including big-budget blockbusters—are still being mastered in 2K (with UHD Blu-Ray discs being upscaled from the 2K masters). My question to anyone for whom spending $300 on an NLE is a big deal: does your project really need more image resolution than titles like Jurassic World and The Hunger Games? Keep in mind that, in addition to spending the $300 on software, your image processing and storage requirements have now quadrupled.
For a close look at the impact of image resolution on cinema viewing, I highly recommend Steve Yedlin's excellent Resolution Demo [0].
[0] http://www.yedlin.net/ResDemo/index.html
mrandish · 2025-04-13
Thanks for weighing in with real-world experience doing film scans.
> From my experience, 4K was the absolute edge you could pull from the best 35mm films... I managed to pull 8K from some 70mm ride footage.
This matches the expert opinion I've heard elsewhere, as well as what was done when scanning Blade Runner (an historically important film now in the national archives). They scanned the 35mm camera negatives at 4K and the 65mm VFX camera negatives at 8k. I'd add that in film scanning, extended color depth is also very important to capturing the full fidelity of what's on the celluloid. An adjacent high-impact factor is how the grain structure of film is handled in post-scan processing. This entails artfully balancing a tricky set of trade-offs because the highest-frequency edge and chroma details are down in the noise floor. Extracting more signal is a knife-edge balance between amplifying noise on one side or suppressing filmic texture on the other. Ultimately, these choices move beyond technical correctness to aesthetic judgement, which I imagine has to be the sweat-inducing part of the job. Anyone really interested in resolution, film scanning and digital cinema should see this in-depth comparison shot by an expert ASC cinematographer specifically to be a definitive set of proofs for the industry. He compares (and pixel-peeps) identical shots from a range of top digital cinema cameras (Arri Alexa, RED, etc) with a high-quality 6K film scan.…
keane · 2026-07-31
Related: Chart Of Common Viewing Angles from Steve Yedlin, ASC https://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/#:~:text=Chart
sim7c00 · 2025-06-21
thanks for your insights. my comment was overly cynical. in practice though visually , on a good (really good) monitor, you really can not see a difference. trained eyes, cannot really see a real difference. the difference becomes visible more due to a monitors own quircks not displaying accurately (mapping of this sdr/hdr to colourspace).
this was posted before here on HN and i dont think its wrong. though ofcourse, technically, there are differences, which might be in some applicaitons ( but usually are not) exploited to the viewers benefit. (?? maybe?? someone with real good eyes :)) https://yedlin.net/DebunkingHDR/index.html
maybe my interpretation is wrong, but i dont think it is far off if it is. specification differences and differences in human perception are not the same thing
ikatson · 2025-06-15
The author has a FAQ related to the video and he expands on "Why don’t you mention HLG in the demo" in it https://www.yedlin.net/HDR_Demo_FAQ.html
kworks · 2024-03-07
Some Yedlin links. I found his process to be methodical, precise, thorough and definitive. The question as to whether there is any perceptible visual difference between film and video that has been post-produced by an expert was definitively answered for me.
Resolution Demos: https://www.yedlin.net/ResDemo/index.html
On Color Science for Filmmakers: https://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html
wilg · 2023-02-09
> Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent.
I swear to god, this website is so infuriating.
If you would like to learn more about this topic you can look at Steve Yedlin’s discussion of the matter https://www.yedlin.net/index.html or look at some of the technical documents linked from our website.
AstixAndBelix · 2023-01-22
This is utterly false and bordering religious beliefs.
Steve Yedlin has dedicated decades of his life to ultimately prove [1] that digital and film can achieve the same exact look, save for the fact that digital is infinitely easier to deal with.
[1] https://yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/index.html
4ad · 2021-05-10
Not quite what you ask, but very related: http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/
turnsout · 2021-04-28
Film is definitely still available, and you can use a target to as a starting point for a LUT, though the workflow is not straightforward. The core of the problem is that you're only sampling a fraction of the number of colors in the LUT, so to derive the rest of the LUT entries, you need to interpolate and extrapolate.
The trick is which algorithm you use to take the sparse 3D mesh of the calibration target and warp/interpolate the rest of the values. Trilinear would be the most naïve (and lowest quality) approach.
There's a ton more detail about how to actually match digital to film in Steve Yedlin's blog [1], including a cool video of sparse color interpolation in 3D (toward the bottom of the page).
[1] http://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/index.html
[2] http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html
danielmorozoff · 2016-10-22
This video is made by Steve Yeldin- the cinematographer on star wars VII and a number of other films. The companion Writeup can be found here:
http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yedlin
ttoinou · 2025-06-14
His previous stuff is so interesting and it's very refreshing to see a Hollywood professional able to dig so deep into those topics and teach us about it https://yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/index.html
I think the point that SDR inputs (to a monitor) can be _similar_ to HDR input to monitors that have high dynamic ranges is obvious if you look at the maths involved. Higher dynamic gives you more precision in the information, you can choose to do what you want with it : higher maximum luminosity, better blacks with less noise, more details in the middle etc.
Of course we should also see "HDR" as a social movement, a new way to communicate between engineers, manufacturers and consumers, it's not "only" a math conversion formula.
I believe we could focus first on comparing SDR and HDR black and white images, to see how higher dynamic range only in the luminosity is in itself very interesting to experience
But in the beginning he is saying the images look similar on both monitors. Surely we could find counter examples and that only applies to his cinema stills ? If he can show this is true for all images then indeed he can show that "SDR input to a HDR monitor" is good enough for all human vision. I'm not sure this is true, as I do psychedelic animation I like to use all the gamut of colors I have at my hand and I don't care about representing scenes from the real world, I just want maximum color p0rn to feed my acid brain : 30 bits per pixels surely improve that, as well…
knaik94 · 2022-12-22
I'm not sure if it's because of growing up watching most things online with limited bitrates, but I realized I dislike film grain a lot. I know that to a certain degree, film grain helps humans resolve finer details. Similar to using noise shaped dithering to allow you to hear more than the theoretical dynamic range in audio or see a larger range of color tones in a picture. But I found that on certain 4K uhd blurays, if I am watching on a small screen the film grain looks very obnoxious. The problem doesn't exist when watching on a big TV, so I know it's not related to projecting on a screen. I really dislike when directors go out of their way to add artificial film grain. Will media players eventually allow users to adjust the film grain that is added back in?
This reminds me of Steve Yedlin's, cinematographer on everything from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Knives Out and its 2022 sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, who showed through research that film can be completely emulated using digital techniques and mixed digital and film shots during Star Wars.
https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movie…
https://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/MatchLensBlur.html
https://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html