I don’t know how to explain this, but here I go. I have a twilight image that I am fighting with. Everything is set up correctly, I am using an HDRI, however, all the colors are muddy. I thought maybe the scene wasn’t meant to be, so I left it alone and I got it the best I could. After the render, I saved out as an EXR and started post in Photoshop and even the effects that I always use was coming out strange. So, something is inherently bad within the image. Can the VFB do something deep in the image that can mess things up?
The OpenEXR file contains the colors exactly as they are calculated by the renderer. It doesn’t look bad other than the lights seem too dim (or the HDRI is too bright, not sure).
Best regards,
Vlado
Okay, thanks. I’ll work on the lighting.
It seems that my gamma is off. By default, the gamma out is 2.2, but when saving as an EXE it needs to be gamma 1, correct?
Okay, maybe not. It (gamma out) doesn’t affect saving a 32bit EXR. It effects saving as a jpeg, so I guess it should be set to gamma 2.2 out and in. fileOutGamma=2.2 is correct and is the default.
Your lighting is indeed off balance like Vlado suggested.
Like arleady said, your light sources seem a bit too dim. The HDRI lighting generally looks okay to me. Dark scenes live al lot from reflections. At least it is much more obvious than in brightly lit scenes. In this case especially the brickwalls and floor could have a lot more reflection with a low glossiness - ideally with a high contrast map counting in the material details. That will brighten up things in some areas as well.