I've been trying to make a skydome with Terragen4 recently, and I'm used to a Linear workflow so I automatically changed the Gamma setting in T4 to 1 and turned off the contrast. I wasn't entirely sure if I should mess with the soft-clip so I left it alone.
The problem that I've been having is the sun is "exploding" in my final render when I open it in the EXR. Since I'm new to this, and I'm using photoshop as well, I'm wondering if it has something to do with the EXR actually being 16-half float rather than 32 bit like Photoshop thinks? (http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18538.0.html)
Thoughts?
Haze glow amount 0.5, power 0.7
Sun is at default settings
The result:
[attach=1]
Expected:
[attach=2]
Gamma, soft clip and contrast only affect the LDR image, not the EXR. If you're working on an sRGB monitor you should leave the gamma at 2.2. This is equivalent to setting your "viewer" to sRGB (approximately) and at the same time outputting LDR images in the sRGB colour space (again this is only an approximation to sRGB).
Once you've done that, you're viewing something fairly close to a linear image. However, soft clip and contrast are both tone mapping effects that change the LDR image but not the EXR, so they'll cause surprises if you load the EXR into another app without reproducing these effects there. So you might prefer to turn them off in Terragen.
Matt
Good to know. Thanks!