My good friend and colleague Adam Myhill is an accomplished film DP and games guy, who made a brilliant post on how the color grading in Uncharted 4's latest trailer could use improvement. If you're interested in going behind the curtain on how increasing dynamic range can help pop a more realistic look in AAA games, I highly recommend you give this a read.
http://www.adammyhill.com/blog/
http://www.adammyhill.com/blog/
Photorealism is about mimicking reality. Reality has a massive dynamic range. If youre going for photorealism, you need to spend all that limited 9.5 stops of dynamic range that this monitor youre looking at can do, otherwise its going to look washed, like old film, or a heavy Instagram effect. Spend the signal to the limits.
Heres another frame with some hot sun hitting the rocks as well as deep shadow values on the left. In real life, the dynamic range would be in the hundreds of thousands to one. Your DSLR camera shooting RAW would capture 20,000:1 or around 14 stops of dynamic range. You could tone map / color correct it into into the display space of 700:1 or about 9.5 stops of dynamic range for a nice punchy image which looks photorealistic, obviously.
In this frame, just a little over half of the dynamic range in a standard video signal is used. Theres bright sun reflections and dark shadows, so it should be higher than that. The highlights arent bright, the shadows arent dark.
After a little massaging, the very darkest of the shadows now hit black and the hottest highlights are just about at white. Its like a grey film has been wiped away.