Colors and materials

[glorybound]

Using a good HDRI or V-Ray Sun/Sky, my colors are always 30-40 percent too bright. I assume this is normal, so how are you guys compensating for that?

• Color-correct node
• Darkening your materials in Photoshop
• RGB level
• Cryptomatte

How are you correcting brightness?

[suzanne_doherty]

Just turn down / balance your lighting. However I generally avoid having any material brighter than 200,200,200.

[glorybound]

So, no monkey business with adjusting each texture? Sun at 100%?

[sirio76]

Once your light sources and cameras are correctly calibrated, if your materials are too bright or too dark you are doing them wrong.

[glorybound]

Then I am doing something wrong .

[suzanne_doherty]

So, no monkey business with adjusting each texture? Sun at 100%?

Well there's always a bit of adjusting, but you adjust the lighting to your desired levels, and then tweak textures. If I use the vray sun, I think I lower it down to something like 0.05 intensity, and don't worry about the camera settings. If I'm using other lights, then their values are just adjusted to suit.

[Mr.Mxyzptlk]

Not doing anything with your camera exposure?

[suzanne_doherty]

Not doing anything with your camera exposure?

No, I have it turned off. For me it's just another variable that I don't need to deal with. I don't use camera exposure, then the lights and materials from each scene will work well in another scene. Plus I balance the brightness with the light values. For me it's more artistic too.

[glorybound]

I think the sun is the killer, and lowering the intensity seems to help. If I want to boost it in a post, I can do so by using an element.

Here is one that I got pretty good on the first try: the colors seem to work with no adjustments in post. The sun's turbulence was adjusted to 5, which I think helped. I also used real world camera exspoure.

[Mr.Mxyzptlk]

No, I have it turned off. For me it's just another variable that I don't need to deal with. I don't use camera exposure, then the lights and materials from each scene will work well in another scene. Plus I balance the brightness with the light values. For me it's more artistic too.

So you're mainly doing stylized renders and not shooting for photo realistic images?

[Joelaff]

So you're mainly doing stylized renders and not shooting for photo realistic images?

Not sure how using exposure or not affects the realism of the render. You can do it with exposure or by adjusting the light values— just like in a real photo studio, or like using ND or scrims outside.

Some sort of filmic style tone mapping can be used with either method. Most vray tools seem to work more easily at their default settings with the exposure method, though.

I prefer EV exposure, since I want to set shutter speed and aperture for artistic reasons. So EV is just like using ND or changing film speed.

[glorybound]

I find it easier to have a base, so I use real-world camera settings, including lenses. This way, I am not guessing. I think part of my issue is my HDRIs. Using V-Ray Sun/Sky seems more straightforward to manage. The image I posted above is real-world camera settings and the default sun/sky, except I changed the Turbidity to 5. All other V-Ray settings are default.

[bruce_hart]

Hey Bobby - out of interest, do you use the Reinhard Burn Value in the Color Mapping roll out? Say, setting it to 0.5? This has the effect of clamping down over-bright areas

[glorybound]

I stopped playing with the Reinhard Burn Value years ago since the frame buffer got updated. I'll revisit it, thank you.

[glorybound]

I save all of my work to iCloud Photos, and I love what Apple's autocorrect does to my images. The pop it gets is fantastic, but it downgrades the file size and compresses it, so it can't be used other than looking at it on social shares and the iPhone. Often, I use Photoshop to match the iCloud version to my version, but it isn't as good. PhotoShop's camera raw is okay, but it's not as good. The Topaz Photo AI destroys my images; do you know of a way to auto-correct on the iPhone without compressing it to a smaller size? Here is Apple's iPhone auto-correct version.