4 ms·

I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken

by dahart 1y ago

I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image. If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.

kevingadd 1y ago
One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus. For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like this one https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones. I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.
alt227 1y ago
> definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. The zelda screenshot he uses as an example of how good things look without HDR, looks terrible to me. It is all washed out with brightness and bloom, and all the shadows in the landscape that in reality would almolst be black, are very light grey.
- XCSme 1y ago
  I agree, it is washed out, and I was trying to find what exactly in the image the author really liked, but all I saw was a decolorated postcard.
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  His argument is that it looks like something someone would paint and I quite agree with that.
  - alt227 1y ago
    His arguement is: > There’s none of that awful heavy handed contrast. No crushed blacks. No randomly saturated whites in the sunset, and saturation overall stays where it belongs across the luminance range. I disagree strongly with all of this. The blacks are crushed hard, they are just crushed to a light grey instead of a dark black. The saturation is washed out, to the point where all the colours are forced into a very limited colour range. It just looks terrible, and if someone painted this I would say the same thing about it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 1y ago
For me games being too dark and not being able to see anything is a pet peeve. I can see the point in a horror game, but I will set the gamma or turn up the brightness if it makes the game hard to play.
- dahart 1y ago
  Oh I agree. The art director needs to be exposing the important gameplay elements to be visible. That doesn’t mean they should avoid blacks for everything though, and that’s what all images except the RE7 image are doing.
- mmis1000 1y ago
  Out of my mind, the destiny 2 is the biggest offender of this category. If I can't see shit at all, how does the feeling artist trying to convince even matter? I will just turn the brightness in graphic card setting all the way up. Because the cap in in game setting is insanely low. Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything even make sense?
carlosjobim 1y ago
You're arguing that game engines should imitate photographic cameras, but they should imitate our eyes, which will never blow out whites outside in the sun.
- dahart 1y ago
  Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Doubly so when looking at the sun or even reflections immediately after being in the dark for a while, and when looking at bright that is very near dark in your visual field. I’m not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad, and I don’t understand why the author is arguing for that.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    > Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Do you have a new technique to decode eye-brain perception in terms of how we perceive visual signals? Do you have a paper indicating how you make this claim for everyone?
    - dahart 1y ago
      Do you really need a paper? It’s well known that looking at the sun does damage to rods and cones, because it far exceeds their response range, long before perception gets involved.
      - NewsaHackO 1y ago
        Woah, the sun is bright? How do you know this is true for everyone? Do you have a peer reviewed RCT paper posted in a high impact journal confirming this?
      - mystraline 1y ago
        'In the sun' != 'at the sun' And you completely miss what I'm asking too. Chemical reactions in the rods and cones are only a small portion of vision processing. The rest is in the brain, with a great deal of various processing happening, that eventually comes to cognition and understanding what you see. And parts of the visual cognition system also synthesize and hallucinate vision systems as well, like the vision hole where the optic nerve meets the eye. But cognitively, the data is there smeared across time and space (as in a SLAM algo putting the data where it should go, not what is measured).
epolanski 1y ago
It's not about being realistic but good looking.
- dahart 1y ago
  Okay, the only image that looks “good” to me in terms of color handling is the RE7 image.
  - epolanski 1y ago
    Zelda is gorgeous.
astrange 1y ago
> The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. It looks like a cheap film camera or a home video screenshot. So it gives off a feeling of nostalgia to a sufficiently old person, but this is also the kind of photo you'd reject as a pro, because it's totally overexposed.

by dahart 1y ago

kevingadd 1y ago

One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus. For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.

PaulHoule 1y ago
I made thermal prints (receipt printer) of concept art from Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, like this one https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones. I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.

alt227 1y ago

> definitely not Zelda nor GTA5. The zelda screenshot he uses as an example of how good things look without HDR, looks terrible to me. It is all washed out with brightness and bloom, and all the shadows in the landscape that in reality would almolst be black, are very light grey.

XCSme 1y ago
I agree, it is washed out, and I was trying to find what exactly in the image the author really liked, but all I saw was a decolorated postcard.
wodenokoto 1y ago
His argument is that it looks like something someone would paint and I quite agree with that.
- alt227 1y ago
  His arguement is: > There’s none of that awful heavy handed contrast. No crushed blacks. No randomly saturated whites in the sunset, and saturation overall stays where it belongs across the luminance range. I disagree strongly with all of this. The blacks are crushed hard, they are just crushed to a light grey instead of a dark black. The saturation is washed out, to the point where all the colours are forced into a very limited colour range. It just looks terrible, and if someone painted this I would say the same thing about it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 1y ago

For me games being too dark and not being able to see anything is a pet peeve. I can see the point in a horror game, but I will set the gamma or turn up the brightness if it makes the game hard to play.

dahart 1y ago
Oh I agree. The art director needs to be exposing the important gameplay elements to be visible. That doesn’t mean they should avoid blacks for everything though, and that’s what all images except the RE7 image are doing.
mmis1000 1y ago
Out of my mind, the destiny 2 is the biggest offender of this category. If I can't see shit at all, how does the feeling artist trying to convince even matter? I will just turn the brightness in graphic card setting all the way up. Because the cap in in game setting is insanely low. Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything even make sense?

carlosjobim 1y ago

You're arguing that game engines should imitate photographic cameras, but they should imitate our eyes, which will never blow out whites outside in the sun.

dahart 1y ago
Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Doubly so when looking at the sun or even reflections immediately after being in the dark for a while, and when looking at bright that is very near dark in your visual field. I’m not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad, and I don’t understand why the author is arguing for that.
- mystraline 1y ago
  > Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Do you have a new technique to decode eye-brain perception in terms of how we perceive visual signals? Do you have a paper indicating how you make this claim for everyone?
  - dahart 1y ago
    Do you really need a paper? It’s well known that looking at the sun does damage to rods and cones, because it far exceeds their response range, long before perception gets involved.
    - NewsaHackO 1y ago
      Woah, the sun is bright? How do you know this is true for everyone? Do you have a peer reviewed RCT paper posted in a high impact journal confirming this?
    - mystraline 1y ago
      'In the sun' != 'at the sun' And you completely miss what I'm asking too. Chemical reactions in the rods and cones are only a small portion of vision processing. The rest is in the brain, with a great deal of various processing happening, that eventually comes to cognition and understanding what you see. And parts of the visual cognition system also synthesize and hallucinate vision systems as well, like the vision hole where the optic nerve meets the eye. But cognitively, the data is there smeared across time and space (as in a SLAM algo putting the data where it should go, not what is measured).

epolanski 1y ago

It's not about being realistic but good looking.

dahart 1y ago
Okay, the only image that looks “good” to me in terms of color handling is the RE7 image.
- epolanski 1y ago
  Zelda is gorgeous.

astrange 1y ago

> The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast. It looks like a cheap film camera or a home video screenshot. So it gives off a feeling of nostalgia to a sufficiently old person, but this is also the kind of photo you'd reject as a pro, because it's totally overexposed.