How does Local Tone Mapping in HDR10+ ADVANCED differ from standard tone mapping?

Standard (global) tone mapping applies a single brightness curve across the entire frame. This works well for most content, but can struggle when a scene contains both very bright highlights and very dark shadow areas simultaneously; the compromise curve required to handle the extremes can crush detail in either direction.

Local Tone Mapping in HDR10+ ADVANCED allows content providers to define specific regions of the frame, circular, elliptical, or rectangular, where tone mapping should be applied differently from the rest of the image. Each defined region carries its own distribution values, allowing the display to tone map that area independently. The result is that a bright, practical light source in the corner of a dark scene, or a sunlit window in an otherwise shadowed room, can be rendered with full detail in both regions simultaneously.

Local Tone Mapping metadata can be defined by the content creator within their color grading suite during the color process, or generated automatically.