15 miles on the Erie Canal

[sboerner]

Quick color-balance adjustment in Lightroom.

[Dune]

It's a fantastic final! And what a journey indeed. I like the changes you've made, but to be honest I preferred the lighting in your previous version. At least on my machine, this render looks very harsh and blue, and the previous had that mellow summer feel that I would associate with the old days.
But it's your work, and something to be really proud of.

Looking forward to your next journey.

[j meyer]

Great achievement after all that work, congrats, very well done.
Has been very interesting to follow along.

[sboerner]

At least on my machine, this render looks very harsh and blue, and the previous had that mellow summer feel that I would associate with the old days.

Thanks, Ulco. In my haste to post the final rendering I didn't take the time to adjust the color balance. (Not something I usually have to do with TG renderings.) I've removed the image with the blue color cast. Does the color-balanced version (posted earlier today) look better on your machine? I am looking for that warm, early-autumn feeling here.

[bobbystahr]

At least on my machine, this render looks very harsh and blue, and the previous had that mellow summer feel that I would associate with the old days.

Thanks, Ulco. In my haste to post the final rendering I didn't take the time to adjust the color balance. (Not something I usually have to do with TG renderings.) I've removed the image with the blue color cast. Does the color-balanced version (posted earlier today) look better on your machine? I am looking for that warm, early-autumn feeling here.

on my computer it's an absolutely perfect early Autumn day..nice work in LightRoom

[DocCharly65]

On my office-monitor it looks perfect - not too much of any color. 
...and I like the little changes! Especially I love the new clouds and the little corn (?) field in the top left background... 
This would be a place to stay for hours and watch all details

[Dune]

I may be stubborn, but the previous one you posted was perfect to me in the sense of colors and contrast, besides the changes of course, because I really like those (except the front geese, which I still think are too obtrusive). It had a nice haze, natural blue sky color (though I do like the new clouds!), lighter shadowed areas, less contrast in far away trees. Last one is just not natural enough (for me), too much like a worked on HDR-like photo.

[sboerner]

Ah, OK. You were referring to a rendering from a couple of versions back. 

The most recent rendering was adjusted more in Lightroom than any of the previous ones (to eliminate the blue cast), which may account for some of the changes in contrast and color (and HDR look). The sun is lower, too, lengthening the shadows and eliminating some shadow detail.

Still running renderings on this nightly, tweaking lighting and atmosphere settings. I'll back things up to see if I can address some of these things. Thank you for being stubborn. I've been looking at this for so long that I'm missing things.

[Dune]

Post is sometimes pretty hard to get 'right'. A mental struggle between a soft-toned nice straight render with a little natural haze, or a postworked one where colors and dark-light are stronger, and the darks are really dark. Both are nice in their own way.

[sboerner]

That's so true. And actually all of the images so far have been adjusted quite a bit in Lightroom, mostly for the shadows, which are quite dark in the original renderings.

The 11/11 rendering also had higher Enviro light and haze settings, which explains the softer look. Comparing the two now I think I want to end up somewhere in between, warmer and not as hazy as the first rendering but less contrasty than the second.

Might be a few days. Need to take a break so I can look at it with fresh eyes.

[Hannes]

Did you try to render it with the path tracer? The scene is so full and beautiful, and I think especially the plants would look even better.

[sboerner]

The most recent full-frame renderings are path-traced. There *is* a striking difference between the two with this scene, so I've been using the path tracer exclusively now that it handles transparency.

I've been checking the translucency settings on all of the foliage, setting it between 0.4 and 0.5. I'm assuming that this is now "true" translucency. Haven't done any side-by-side comparisons but there seems to be an improvement.

[WAS]

Yeah you can tell it's path traced. The shadow computation is night and day between standard. While I love TG in all it's glory I always had a issue with it's standard shadows. Seemed faked almost when there was a lot of GI, especially if occlusion weight and bounce to the ounce wasn't adjusted per-scene. This is one of the reasons I can tell the difference between PT and standard, even without vegetation. How shadows are rendered is entirely different (when it comes to image pass)

[Dune]

Steve; maybe  have a look at the opacity of the leaves too. I usually set that lower than one (but certainly higher than 0.5), as that gives more light between the leaves. Only with jpg's as opacity mask you have to take care, don't know why, but then opacity is somwehat unpredictable. Mine are usually the alpha channel of a tif anyway.

[sboerner]

Thanks, Ulco. This is a good tip.

I've been testing it on a smaller scene to see what the different values might do while using the path tracer. Opacity values above 0.5 create very subtle lighting variations, while those <= 5.0 are equivalent to zero and cause the objects to disappear, just as they do with the standard renderer.

(I had wondered if this behavior might change with the path tracer, but apparently the default shader's translucency and opacity settings work the same regardless of the renderer.)