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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: xxpagxx on October 18, 2009, 08:33:48 PM

Title: Washed Out Renders?
Post by: xxpagxx on October 18, 2009, 08:33:48 PM
I've created a few renders in Terragen and they look okay as far as I can tell. However, the images generally look very "washed out". It's as if the gamma needs to be increased, and the brightness needs to be lowered. But the problem is, I don't know what to change. I've experimented with the camera exposure, final render gamma, lighting from the sun, etc. but I can't find the right combination to get a rich result. How should I go about fixing this problem?

Here's some examples:

(http://i.imgur.com/d0tIS.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/zkKCn.jpg)

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)
Title: Re: Washed Out Renders?
Post by: Henry Blewer on October 18, 2009, 08:35:46 PM
Check the atmosphere haze. With the low sun angles, the haze has more power to color the landscape. You may have to lower the haze density.
Title: Re: Washed Out Renders?
Post by: stuck on October 19, 2009, 08:10:01 AM
In your second render it looks as if you have altered the half height of the atmospheric blue, i.e. reduced it and thus 'compressed' the sky colour into a narrow band close to the horizon.  If you increase it again the sky will lose it's shades of grey appearance and become blue again.

stuck
Title: Re: Washed Out Renders?
Post by: Cyber-Angel on October 19, 2009, 08:31:06 AM
In real life if you took a photograph of a landscape under those sun angel conditions, you'd get much the same result you have in your renders; in fact what you have here is mild compered to how a landscape would look in real life.

No existing display technology this includes computer monitors has the dynamic range of the human eye, under lighting conditions as shown here the glare form the sun would be overpowering in its intensity making proper viewfinder use all but impossible in even the brightest viewfinder making the camera difficult to use under these conditions.

;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel       
Title: Re: Washed Out Renders?
Post by: xxpagxx on October 19, 2009, 09:57:24 AM
Yup, I reduced the atmospheric blue in the second image. I found that it looked better with the darker sky.
After some more tweaking, it looks like reducing the final render gamma all the way down to '1' and increasing the camera's gamma a little helps things a lot. While things still do look slightly bland (which apparently theres nothing I really can do), the overall white flushed out problem is gone.
Thanks for the comments  :D