Good to have you in my side. But outside the contrast is also much too high. For exterior I would suggest -20 % contrast: original View attachment 11845 -20 % contrast View attachment 11846
I'm not sure for outside, not on a strong-sunny track like Bahrain... I've been to Bahrain, and you really have a lot of contrast in real life with the sharp sun. I tried reducing contrast from the Brabham shots in the original post, and that only ended up looking flat. For interior shots you posted I really saw the improvement, for the other example it's less clear to me.
The actual contrast you see is depending on much things (daytime, etc.). But I think it´s necessary to clear this thing up for rF2 or other games with continue to push forward and away. rF2 has this HDR problem since a couple of builds. I can not remember that I had to much contrast in the first builds.
We're entering the personal taste area. Something it's impossible to average into an algorithm and as Tim said, you'll still have someone saying he want less light, more light, less sat, more sat, less contrast, more contrast and so on.... . It's still a matter of choice, as for the photographer, to cut or save whites and details into the high key area. I want just to say video cams and DSLR are not the reality; everything is going to be processed, given the human input (taste, rules, hardware, lens, filters, sensor etc etc etc). The delta involved is too big to take a video or a picture as a reference point. It has been discussed a zillion...so I'm not going to bother with that stuff again. Let me said that, just for fun; in the broadcast division, if you're going to burn whites, causing video signal clipping all the time, you're going to be fired soon. Same in the architectural photography. Burning whites and losing informations is not good. Seriously speaking; yes, we're trying to save a bit of details on that area (whites), but on low sun angles you're already getting over exposures and very wide gradients along the sky to horizon...but given the proper HDR evaluation, we need to cap specific values to keep the entire scene overall luminance inside a wanted range. And of course doesn't work easy as a TV; it's not a brightness/contrast or a gamma choice. Stuff you're pointing at is more related to the curve used with its own linear gamma space, which is NOT the same thing as the monitor gamma. It's a very wide range of variables involved and affecting each other, so, at the time you're starting unbalancing something, to push or pull on a side, you're going to screwing up everything. That said, if your monitor is bad calibrated NO WAY you can solve rolling the game gamma and most of monitor and TV used out there are bad calibrated and using wrong profiles. As for tastes....There are lot people who don't like to see burned areas. I remember more than one complain about that in the past with the luminance pushing on the high key, burning whites and losing details and sometimes causing AA jaggies. I'm not saying we don't have room to improve the automation and it's still open to future passes, but the slider you're talking about it's something I don't think it's going to happen. Not in that form, at least. Think about the mess with people jumping in and out between the video settings page, then load the track to check, then leaving the race room and back to video settings again...and doing that for a track they think it's too dark (maybe with not perfect materials), and then messing again for another track which is the opposite... and then other people fighting with bad calibrated monitor, trying to compensate a bad Monitor correction gamma with the linear gamma, discovering artifacts or causing horrible responses. To sum up; the automation is already doing his job. Let's see if there is room to improve a bit the dynamic without screwing up.
Thanks for your large reply Tuttle. But this liberalism of thinking is missing one thing. The standard. If you have a look at "the other games" you can see a average balance of tones, contrast and saturation. I´m photographer. So I have learned to see how something looks "clean". Taste is if you´re like it with more contrast or less saturation or (NfS SHIFT style) with violet tones or ... But there is a "standard" if you want to believe it or not. (If there is no right or wrong why there is very expensive PC color managing soft- and hardware?) I´m honoring your work (really I do) but rF2 has become a game with too much of contrast. And yes there was a difference between HDR filters in earlier versions.
We're using a full day solar (night/day) cycle and a complete geo and weather system. All this stuff is passing through the HDR pipeline and we're capping the gamma to get a stable overall luminance and brightness output for the entire cycle and the entire globe. The range available for tuning is very small, without starting screwing up something.
On my configuration the current result with the HDR Automation look more than perfect IMO and if a slider is added I will not touch it at all for sure. I have lot of games and applications and currently I don't have to touch any settings when going from one to another to rF2. I'm really happy about the work done on this area, thanks a bunch ISI, I'm discovering again all tracks and cars I play with. I have a brand new rF2 Sim
This is a great idea! Everything always comes down to how the monitors are adjusted, so this gives us end users the option to adjust (or screw up, heh) the end result without losing the brilliant automated HDR function.
I think the biggest problem is that game HDR =/= photo HDR. With a true photo HDR, cockpits would appear more detailed, and far less willing to fall into a puddle of black, while the outside world should remain nice and detailed. In a game sense though, more often than not game HDR is "do you like bloom?" (thankfully not rF2's case, but it is most certainly AC's!), "MOAR CONTRAST!!!!" (rF2's problem to a degree IMO) and "Oh yea, we will just turn sky that you know is blue, white - it looks cooler!" (which about a zillion games fall into). In a way, HDR in games is more akin to LDR than HDR, usually with one end of the spectrum getting obliterated, either your shadows become puddles of darkness or your highlights just become white masses. Pretty much the exact thing HDR is designed to prevent. The screenies from Rainmaker above are somewhat a demo of what I mean... The original the cockpit is basically a black void, it has lost everything. The edited one (and mind you you can only do so much with an edit in terms of bringing areas back, which is why it looks nasty) is actually closer to what HDR should be doing. Is the cockpit and world exposed independently, or is it just done as a whole scene at the end? I assume it's done at the end across the whole scene. Would it be possible to edit the automated setting, similar to the old profiles?
If you make the dark parts light enough to see what you would if you looked at them in real life, and the bright parts dark enough to see what you would in real life, the image as a whole starts to look too flat. At the same time if you make the light parts look the way they look when you're looking at something dark (not the easiest thing to judge in real life, using peripheral vision) or vice versa, it gets too contrasty. As Tuttle says this is really getting into personal choice, and to some extent you have to just accept ISI's artistic vision. Do people look at the Mona Lisa and say it's underexposed? Maybe, but it's not their choice...
I'de say the Mona Lisa is indeed over exposed as it has been hanging in a museum for so many decades.
Automation mean usually that you don't have to touch anything, and it's fine to me Perhaps, for people who want to tweak the Automation HDR result, having a specific HDR profile (specific filename or extension?) with relatives values in it instead of absolute values? So custom Automation HDR is possible for them? Saying that, I will not use it like I said. I'm just thinking out loud for people who want to go further and tweak it.
I was just thinking that if ppl that were capable could mod it 10% brighter. Still automation but 10% brighter...
overall automation works good, but to my taste there is too much difference when looking with the sun and staring at the sun. shadows are to dark. You can tweak this by using t lum ans s lum(sorry im not sure cause i havent looked into devmode for so long) . Its easy too change and when looking with the sun its looks good , but looking straight at the sun its too dark, thats my opinion.
Well, Tuttle is right... (big surprise there Actually ATI CCC has already gamma adjustment and contrast adjustment, and it applys in game just fine. But at 1.25 Gamma, what happens is that the colors go back to being more "pastel", i.e. the grass gets stupid again. The white cars don't go full white however. I also tried lower contrast which indeed is okay in some cockpits, but makes the outside world look a bit bland. There's not a single slider for better results it seems. It definitly depends on time of day also. My gut feeling would be right now to say that simulating eye adjustment to dark cockpits and bright sky (i.e. auto exposure setting to be tuned further) could solve a bit of these issues.
^This. You cannot compare the visuals of a simulator software to a processed photo. It's like comparing apples to oranges. A HDR photo does not represent the way our eyes work. Our eyes adjust dynamically to the intensity of light we're dealing with. In other words, our eyes adjust the range for our whole view dynamically, and that takes some time as well. What HDR does (in the world of a photographer) is to adjust the ranges of brightness, saturation etc LOCALLY, because we aren't adjusting the photo on a global level. Blackened out areas are brightened up, while burned out areas are darkened, and we can bring back all the details in all areas at the exact same time (given the fact we are talking about a photo with more than 8bits/channel). In other words, a HDR photo is a composition of multiple images our own eyes could see (i we would let them adjust for quite some time for every little area we could look at), because our eyes actually do work pretty much the same as a camera. But we cannot "see" compositions of course, our eyes can only adjust on a global level for the whole scene we are looking at at one very moment. In short, we will never be able to see the world like this: If we look into the sun, everything else will look pretty much black. When you are surrounded by complete darkness (for some time), a lit match initially burn your eyes. We can't see both bright and dark areas with all their detail at the same time. To bring that back to the visuals of a simulator - What should it adjust to? If it is going to simulate our own vision, we definitely won't see things like in the photo above. We should see things blackened out, we should see things burned out as well. But always keep one thing in mind: The software does not know where you are looking at in the scene you see on your monitor and for how long you have already been looking there. (I think this is the key part right here!) In reality, if you would keep staring at your cockpit (maybe even blocking your sight through the windshield with your hand), yes, you would start to see more details in the cockpit as your eyes begin to adjust to the dark cockpit. Drivers don't do that though. They don't keep staring at the sun as well. So what the automated HDR in rFactor 2 (probably) does, is simply taking the average values of your whole image and adjust according to that. And that's a good reference if you don't know where the user is looking at on screen for any given time. Don't get me wrong, I too believe that it could be tweaked a little more here and there, but right now the new automated HDR does a great job in my eyes. It's heaps better than the yellow mist we had before. Greez Rob
