Wood Grain getting lost in render

[Streetwise]

Ah, right. I read your earlier post too quickly. Thanks for clarifying. I did actually have bitmap filtering set to Summed Area and a blur of .5, but my DMC is set to 1/10. Would 1/6 be that much better? I'm rendering at 4622x6144. Also, would you recommend using Summed Area on the Bump Map material as well?

[windowlicker]

Oh, if you have those settings and you still think detail is getting lost... I would recommend boosting the contrast of the bitmap in Photoshop. But yeah, with those settings I think you should get more out of your texture than what you have there in your render. Could be an exposure issue though - like the image is slightly over exposed. Just a thought.
As for the bump map - if you have the RAM for it, why not?

[Streetwise]

You are right about the exposure thing. I already did bump up the contrast on the bitmat and that did help, but I have a feeling that it probably has more to do with the whole gamma LUT thing (which I don't really understand how all that works yet). I'm using 2.2 for starters but was reading about enabling the "Enable Gamma/LUT Correction" in preferences and how that makes it so you don't have to use as much light to light a scene, plus certain materials display more accurate in the Material Editor. Again, don't know enough about it so I haven't tried it. Results are "good enough" at this point.

I've got 16GB of RAM in the box so it seems fine to fiddle with the bump map. Not sure what it's doing to render times yet though or if it's worth it.

Dave