pureHDR

Table of contents
Activating HDR in Windows ............................................................................................................................................. 2
HDR Calibration in Windows 11 ....................................................................................................................................... 3
Download and Install the HDR Calibration Tool ............................................................................................................ 3
Run the HDR Display Calibration .................................................................................................................................. 4
Activating HDR in Content Manager................................................................................................................................. 5
CM – AC video settings ................................................................................................................................................ 5
CM – CSP / DXGI settings ............................................................................................................................................. 5
pureHDR.......................................................................................................................................................................... 6
A new milestone in AC/CSP HDR .................................................................................................................................. 6
How pureHDR works.................................................................................................................................................... 7
The HDR Debug curve .................................................................................................................................................. 7
Activating HDR in Windows

Open the Display settings, select your HDR display and activate HDR

Open the HDR Setup

Click the arrow right next to the HDR activator

HDR Calibration in Windows 11

Download and Install the HDR Calibration Tool

Click “HDR Display Calibration”

Install “Windows HDR Calibration”

Run the HDR Display Calibration
Activating HDR in Content Manager

CM – AC video settings
- Select pureHDR or pureHDR-EYE as PPfilter
- Fullscreen must be unchecked (CSP HDR will NOT work in fullscreen)
- FXAA must be activated

CM – CSP / DXGI settings

- Activate DXGI and HDR support
- Set True borderless windows style to get a Fullscreen window
- “Use PP-filter HDR-related values if defined” must be active
pureHDR
A new milestone in AC/CSP HDR

With CSP 0.1.80p428 and later, a new post-processing method was introduced. AC is using a post-processing suite called
YEBIS. YEBIS brings many nice PP features like Glare, godrays, color management and tone-mapping. Now, YEBIS post
processing can be completely bypassed by the weather style (like Pure). This gives the freedom to use a custom-made
post-processing. It could be more advanced or simpler now, or it could bring manipulations of tones in HDR mode.

Pure 0.220 introduces an optional custom post-processing with many optimizations. I’ll call it “customPP”. One of the
greatest features with this new customPP is custom tone-mapping in HDR.

The pureHDR filter will force customPP, you don’t need to set anything. It also uses its own tone-mapping function –
coded inside of the script, which brings great results to achieve a functional and aesthetic HDR tone conversion. The
developed code gives a handy control to manage certain dynamic ranges.

You can control/customize the tonal compression in Pure Config app – “PP” – “PP Tonemapping control”:

Input Brightness
Scales the input, before exponentiation

Output Brightness
Scales the output, before the limiter

Exponent
The exponent of the exponential function
output = inputexponent

Exponent High Falloff

How much the exponent is lowered for high tones

Blacklift Low Exposure

The blacklift in bright sceneries

Blacklift High Exposure

The blacklift in dark sceneries

Debug_clipping
Tones above the maximum are show red
Tones below 0.001 are shown green

Debug_curve
View the tone conversion as a curve
Display some gray bars to measure tone values

Debug_curve Size and Positioning

Customize the position and the size of the curve
How pureHDR works

Via the pureHDR.ini HDR settings, the linear tones after the render passes are converted to a logarithmic form.
The resulting values can be defined in 2 ranges:

- the important tones, with nearly all information

- the HDR details range, with all super bright tones

HDR settings in pureHDR.ini:

[EXT_DXGI_HDR]
CUSTOM_YEBIS_TONEMAPPING=0
POST_BRIGHTNESS=1.0
POST_GAMMA=1
POST_TONEMAPPING=0
SUPPORTED=1
YEBIS_BRIGHTNESS=1.0

We can now manage the important tones, like LDR and do a different calculation in the high range.

The HDR Debug curve

Here you can monitor the tone conversion. You see, there is a lift of ultra-low values, an LDR-like handling of low values,
an exponential transfer of low-mid and mid tones and a compression of high tones.

Green:
Shows the range from 0 – 0.125

Yellow:
Shows the range from 0 – 1.0

Red:
Shows the range from 0 – 8
With the bars you can measure output values on the screen:

If you’d like to develop your own HDR conversion or HDR PPfilter, feel free to use pureHDR as a base. Also, take a look at
“pureHDR.lua”. There you will find many comments, and you will see how UI elements are defined, how a shader code
is defined, and how everything plays together.

You will find that script in \assettocorsa\system\cfg\ppfilters\pure_scripts.