A Desert Sunset

[nvseal]

Not much to say. It it what it is. I decided to do something other than planet renders for once. 

[rcallicotte]

Cool.  It's making me thirsty.

[old_blaggard]

Your sun looks a bit bright to me, but your colors look pretty good otherwise.  

[rcallicotte]

I thought the same thing, until I realized if I was looking directly at the sun that's the way it would look. 

Your sun looks a bit bright to me, but your colors look pretty good otherwise.  

[old_blaggard]

I can see your point.  I guess I was just comparing the brightness of the sun in the sky with the brightness of the sunlight on the terrain.  I feel like a sun that bright and that high should result in a brighter landscape.

[rcallicotte]

O_B, this is just what I'm beginning to wonder about some of the pictures I've seen and made - the natural eye changes when it looks toward or away from light.  So, how can we capture that without being surreal?  This is a real question, so I hope you don't take this as a rhetorical question.  I'm not even sure I should use this forum to bring this up.  But, I wonder about lighting in this way so that someone has surely already thought about the way our eyes work and the way we respond differently to the sun, which depends on so many various conditions.

Anyway, I see what you mean.  So, I'm not being difficult.  Really.   

[old_blaggard]

My completely uneducated, wild guess (<- disclaimer ) is that you're right: the eye will adjust to bright and low light.  The most important single element of that adjustment is, to my knowledge, the dilation and contraction of the pupil.  Thus, when the light is bright, less of it will be let in because the pupil contracts, and when there isn't much light, the pupil dilates to let more light through.  This could probably be simulated by modifying the exposure parameter.  As for this image in particular, the pupil (or camera aperture) would be contracted, so not as much light could get through.  I have, however, stared directly into the sun enough times that I'll be hitting myself when I'm forty, and I still think that the terrain is a little on the dark side.

[ProjectX]

It's a bit over-sharpened, and the clouds a bit "blobby" (although the distant clouds are gorgeous) but the terrain is very nice and the lighting beautiful.

[nvseal]

Yes, the clouds could probably be a little less sharp and the they are a bit blobby. I was trying to get the blobby look (at first, this scene was only supposed to be a cloud test until I added some terrain).

[ProjectX]

The terrain's the worst offender for sharpness.