Printing spatially-varying reflectance for reproducing HDR images

We present a solution for viewing high dynamic range (HDR) images with spatially-varying distributions of glossy materials printed on reflective media. Our method exploits appearance variations of the glossy materials in the angular domain to display the input HDR image at different exposures. As viewers change the print orientation or lighting directions, the print gradually varies its appearance to display the image content from the darkest to the brightest levels. Our solution is based on a commercially available printing system and is fully automatic. Given the input HDR image and the BRDFs of a set of available inks, our method computes the optimal exposures of the HDR image for all viewing conditions and the optimal ink combinations for all pixels by minimizing the difference of their appearances under all viewing conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with print samples generated from different inputs and visualized under different viewing and lighting conditions. © 2012 ACM 0730-0301/2012/08-ART40.