What looks good, what looks real, is actually an active area of psychophysics research in high-dynamic range image capture and rendering. The real world is hig

What looks good, what looks real, is actually an active area of psychophysics research in high-dynamic range image capture and rendering. The real world is high dynamic range, but human vision is much more limited, but also spacially variant and adaptive. So we get multiple optimized "snap shots" of a scene rendered in real time and mapped into what our brain considers one scene. Look toward high key high brightness area of a scene, retina gain function clamps down the iris closes and you get properly rendered details in those areas, look toward a tree shaded bench at a rock under that bench and iris opens, gain function increases and again the shadow details are rendered. Cameras are just starting to do this. But that's capture. It's still HDR. Now you have to re-render all of that if you're going to reproduce it on a lower dynamic range device like a computer display. There aren't that many HDR screens on the market yet but those are also coming, and it means we don't have to do that next stage re-rendering which is a lot more subjective and still actively researched why some renderings look real and others look cartoonish. And the same would be true for computer generated graphics rather than captures.