over-saturated greens again

[zerO_crash]

Don't worry about it. What matters is, that relevant parties aim for the same. In reality, the maps are built differently, as such, the question of individual map tuning becomes not only a hassle, but actually difficult, as the forms msking them, might have differing objectives.

 

Knowing where the issue lies, I'm rather in for easy and elegant fixes. The thing with a community of any size, is that there will always be different wishes overall. Some prefer more vivid imagery, others will prefer more tone, third will have poorly adjusted screens and wish for something completely different.

 

The current implementation of color filters, is not bad a bad idea in principle. The question is whether the "realistic" filter can be adjusted in terms of the ground-color palette, not touching the sky/water.

 

@BIGNEWY @Wags @NineLine

 

Based on the thread, is there any chance of having the "realistic"-filter adjusted further?

[zerO_crash]

[PLUTON]

Thank you Stanlesuper
I tried your sample and found it to my taste
I will keep it with your agreement
thank you again and keep up the great work

[Stanlesuper]

You can try both of them:

Modified LUT preset orange and orange 2 in attached files, just backup your DCS/bazar/effects/LUT folder and replace those two .png files.

It works great even on desert maps like sinai, also channel map ...

 

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2024 by Stanlesuper

[PLUTON]

I tried it on Normandie 2 and finished the colors
cartoons (Walt Disney) now it has become pleasant to watch
A big thank you to you for your work Ms Stanlesuper

[Stanlesuper]

Normady 2, oh I forgot this one

[twistking]

On 5/20/2024 at 9:38 PM, zerO_crash said:

[...] The thing with a community of any size, is that there will always be different wishes overall. Some prefer more vivid imagery, others will prefer more tone, third will have poorly adjusted screens and wish for something completely different.

The current implementation of color filters, is not bad a bad idea in principle. The question is whether the "realistic" filter can be adjusted in terms of the ground-color palette, not touching the sky/water.

@BIGNEWY @Wags @NineLine

Based on the thread, is there any chance of having the "realistic"-filter adjusted further?

You're suggesting the issue was a problem of taste or personal preference. It's not. The greens in some DCS maps are erroneous and should be treated as a bug, not as a point of discussion. Of course there are personal preferences when it comes to colour. We already established that the slightly over-saturated look of DCS is artist's intent. Fair enough. The lime greens however are not artist's intent!
Using custom LUTs to correct these colour problem is a crutch for obvious reasons. I'm not against offering more LUTs to choose from the graphics menu. @Stanlesuper's work looks quite good and would be of benefit for many, but it's not an ideal solution.
DCS is using PBR (rendering). It should generally be able to achieve realistic colours in "most" situations. Sometimes it erroneously doesn't, which might be a issue with the renderer or the assets, or both. This must be fixed. Colour post processing (and custom LUTs) are the last step in the pipeline. They can be used to cater to different user preferences, retain a natural or more stylized look. Using them to correct bad assets is not ideal!

Edited May 21, 2024 by twistking

[zerO_crash]

1 hour ago, twistking said:

The lime greens however are not artist's intent!

How do you know?! The color palette is already there! Granted, the map is in warly access, whether the color comes off as a auto-generated overlay (from satellite imagery) or not, the colors are as they currently are. What makes me believe that it was intentional, is that the places which contain most lime-green, were indeed used for advertising. In other words, the devs. weren't shying away from these colors. 
 

Again, while some places will have a lime-green type of vegetation (summer), there definitely is too much of it on the map. There shouldn't be any lime-green on the hilly areas. The case point, however, is that other maps with green vegetation have slightly too much vibrancy as well. That goes for both ED and 3rd party ones. Instead, then, of changing each and every map, and additionally correcting every filter, they might as well simply correct the "realisric" filter. That's the one you will use for our neccessity anyways.

 

Actually, if you take a look at what has happened with lightning in DCS the last couple of years, you'll notice that we cannot ask for anything definite just yet. The illumination has been changed gradually, and that is mostly visible in cockpit and in certain cases, had needed updating of modules in order to cope with the global lightning. ED is tweaking light, without mentioning it in the patches. That's why a filter is better now, and when the global illumination settles, have it corrected once and for all. 

[twistking]

4 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

How do you know?! [...] What makes me believe that it was intentional, is that the places which contain most lime-green, were indeed used for advertising. In other words, the devs. weren't shying away from these colors.[...]

If the person who created those peculiar colours did so with intent, this person wasn't an artist. Therefore it cannot be artist's intent, merely creators's intent.
Joking aside, i just highly doubt it: It does not make sense artistically whatever style the creator was going for. I cannot proof it though.
Obviously the result was deemed "good enough", but that does not mean that it was intended, only that it was tolerated.

4 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

Actually, if you take a look at what has happened with lightning in DCS the last couple of years, you'll notice that we cannot ask for anything definite just yet. The illumination has been changed gradually, and that is mostly visible in cockpit and in certain cases, had needed updating of modules in order to cope with the global lightning. ED is tweaking light, without mentioning it in the patches. That's why a filter is better now, and when the global illumination settles, have it corrected once and for all. 

Again: DCS uses PBR. With PBR albedo colours should generally (!) match their real world counterpart. Colours are way more objectifiable than amateurs would assume and with PBR this should extend into the realms of computer generated imagery.
I'm not interested in discussing this further, as i'm relatively certain that it's mostly an asset (map) issue. Also there's no harm in having different CC presets to correct for it in post. I was only pointing out, that CC is not the ideal solution. It is a solution nonetheless.

Edited May 22, 2024 by twistking

[zerO_crash]

The reason I'm mentioning changing the filter, rather than actual maps themselves, is the qualitative nature of the argument. Whether a change gets implemented or not, depends mainly on the credibility of our argument. What we have right now, is a point of view of a couple of individuals, which is definitely not enough to have ED/3rd parties change the underlying visuals of their maps. We will need something more specific, than simply a opinion-based comparison to IRL photos. 
 

In other words, it's all a matter of argument at this point. (It's easier to change a filter, less intrusive, than changing the underlying imagery of maps. That, especially without any specifics relating to color mixture. Consider that Barthek's mods have through the years been more photorealistic than default Caucasus, yet no replication was ever attempted from the official side. While it might seem strange, I do get why.)

[PLUTON]

I downloaded both reads (orange and orange 2)
and with my eyes I think I can't find any difference 
except perhaps that orange 2 has more blue, but orange 2 does not
doesn't suit me.
So I stay on normal Orange

[twistking]

4 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

The reason I'm mentioning changing the filter, rather than actual maps themselves, is the qualitative nature of the argument. Whether a change gets implemented or not, depends mainly on the credibility of our argument. What we have right now, is a point of view of a couple of individuals, which is definitely not enough to have ED/3rd parties change the underlying visuals of their maps. We will need something more specific, than simply a opinion-based comparison to IRL photos. 
 

In other words, it's all a matter of argument at this point. (It's easier to change a filter, less intrusive, than changing the underlying imagery of maps. That, especially without any specifics relating to color mixture. Consider that Barthek's mods have through the years been more photorealistic than default Caucasus, yet no replication was ever attempted from the official side. While it might seem strange, I do get why.)

The issue is so obvious, there's no need to compare anything to real world photography. The severity of the issue may be perceived differently of course. ED has extremely talented artists and DCS does shading and colours extremely well generally. Aircrafts can look naturalistic / photorealistic and also the terrains look great in most cases. It's unlikely that those artists would not immediately notice when colours are off to such an extend. DCS would not look as good, if everyone working there was colourblind!

I assume that the lime green already exists within the albedo textures of the map assets. If so, then i don't know why it should not be corrected right there. In my CC examples i deliberately used the crudest photoshop colour tool available to make sure it could be replicated with basically every colour tweaker imaginable.

I don't know how the DCS map tools work, but it must be possible to batch process the texture data. A modern PC should be able to do that in a matter of minutes...

Also i'm not sure why you bring up Caucasus. ED's vanilla Caucasus looks fine! It's not photorealistic, but it has a pleasant palette at least. There's nothing pleasant about the lime greens however: That's why i'm so sure, that those are not intended: They are neither naturalistic nor aesthetically pleasing.

Edited May 22, 2024 by twistking

[Stanlesuper]

Tweaking filters I have noticed that cyan is principal responsable of over saturated green, yellow and also bluein my case (sky).

[zerO_crash]

On 5/22/2024 at 6:37 PM, twistking said:

The issue is so obvious, there's no need to compare anything to real world photography. The severity of the issue may be perceived differently of course. ED has extremely talented artists and DCS does shading and colours extremely well generally. Aircrafts can look naturalistic / photorealistic and also the terrains look great in most cases. It's unlikely that those artists would not immediately notice when colours are off to such an extend. DCS would not look as good, if everyone working there was colourblind!

I assume that the lime green already exists within the albedo textures of the map assets. If so, then i don't know why it should not be corrected right there. In my CC examples i deliberately used the crudest photoshop colour tool available to make sure it could be replicated with basically every colour tweaker imaginable.

I don't know how the DCS map tools work, but it must be possible to batch process the texture data. A modern PC should be able to do that in a matter of minutes...

Also i'm not sure why you bring up Caucasus. ED's vanilla Caucasus looks fine! It's not photorealistic, but it has a pleasant palette at least. There's nothing pleasant about the lime greens however: That's why i'm so sure, that those are not intended: They are neither naturalistic nor aesthetically pleasing.

 

No one made the assumption about colorblind, but as you should know, with current workload, if something isn't deemed requested or popular, it gets a backseat in waiting for a fix.

 

I leave that to ED and their staff. What I do, however, help with, are simpler solutions which can spare much hard work. Simpler, as in better, not quantity substituting quality, mind you.

 

Well, ultimately we are talking about bringing everything to more realistic. Caucasus is good for what it is, but objectively, can appear vivid in its color palette at times. A more pronounced example would be the Normandy map. It does have extremely lively greens, almost too perfect. Still, this pales in comparison to Kola.

 

I'm mentioning that there is more work to be done, in the grand scheme of things, with Kola only being an example. We'll see what comes out of it down the line.

Edited May 24, 2024 by zerO_crash

[twistking]

17 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

No one made the assumption about colorblind [...]

That was just me being a polemic scoundrel.

17 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

[...] I leave that to ED and their staff. What I do, however, helpt with, are simpler solutions which can spare much hard work. Simpler, as in better, not quantity substituting quality, mind you. [...]

Fair enough.

17 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

[...] Well, ultimately we are talking about bringing everything to more realistic. Caucasus is good for what it is, but objectively, can appear vivid in its color palette at times. A more pronounced example would be the Normandy map. It does have extremely lively greens, almost too perfect. Still, this pales in comparison to Kola. [...]

At first i was surprised, that you would call Caucasus (too) vivid in its palette, but then i remembered that it has different seasons (which is a great feature) and that i always avoided spring, because colours could be a bit "out there". However, Caucasus is still a good example of artist's intend and subjectivity and taste. I mean you could easily make the argument that Caucasus doesn't look photo-realistic or naturalistic, but it clearly looks the way it does on purpose. It looks a bit artificial, but is well crafted (obviously lacking detail compared to newer maps) and produces pleasing images. Again, easily recognized as being video-game-graphics, but still nice to look at.

Normandy is indeed way more "problematic" in that regard, but personally i don't find it too offensive, because there's just a lot of detail, so i don't focus too much on those "jarring" colours. I think Kola is especially problematic in scenes where there's less detail and those blotches of lime really catch the viewers attention.

Edited May 23, 2024 by twistking

[twistking]

20 hours ago, Stanlesuper said:

Tweaking filters I have noticed that cyan is principal responsable of over saturated green, yellow and also bluein my case (sky).

I also noticed that often the greens are so much off, that they were technically not green anymore, but cyan, if you want to make that distinction.
But it still boils down to greens being too "cold" (too much blue), too saturated and probably to bright also.

When you discover those "lime" greens in satellite imagery, those areas seem to be overexposed. This would explain the brightness and wrong white balance.

[T.Power]

On 5/7/2024 at 1:52 AM, YoYo said:

lowering the saturation, you will spoil other things

Only if you over do it, part of the issue is that there's not enough contrast in the standard settings, if you fix the contrast you must desaturate to compensate, as a trained graphic designer my eyes see the issue right across the palette, if you start tweaking individual objects you'll likely make a mess, adjustment layers are last in the chain (mostly).  You can easily fix with this Reshade with zero hit to performance by using curves plus either saturation control or technicolour which is desaturation plus a tint which if used sparingly can be quite effective.  Curves gives you individual luma and chroma control, you can use either or both, that's personal preference but you can control bloom and crush blacks at the same time.

Does anyone know how accurate their monitors are?  What's the Delta etc?  Seriously just use the adjustment layer, if you mess up it'll be a lot easier to rectify and you can do that on the fly.

After some fiddling Levels and Vibrance combined are the best solution due to better bloom control.

Edited May 24, 2024 by T.Power

[zerO_crash]

On 5/23/2024 at 5:56 PM, twistking said:

At first i was surprised, that you would call Caucasus (too) vivid in its palette, but then i remembered that it has different seasons (which is a great feature) and that i always avoided spring, because colours could be a bit "out there". However, Caucasus is still a good example of artist's intend and subjectivity and taste. I mean you could easily make the argument that Caucasus doesn't look photo-realistic or naturalistic, but it clearly looks the way it does on purpose. It looks a bit artificial, but is well crafted (obviously lacking detail compared to newer maps) and produces pleasing images. Again, easily recognized as being video-game-graphics, but still nice to look at.

Normandy is indeed way more "problematic" in that regard, but personally i don't find it too offensive, because there's just a lot of detail, so i don't focus too much on those "jarring" colours. I think Kola is especially problematic in scenes where there's less detail and those blotches of lime really catch the viewers attention.

More or less. Kola being the most prominent example, let's wait and see if the feedback gets through, and it gets corrected. If a single customer was able to "objectively" bring it closer to IRL relatively easily, I don't see why Orbx would not be able to do the same. 
 

That, or a comment from them explaining why they, eventually, believe that this is correct. 
 

For the rest, we'd have to open individual topics anyways, I'm afraid. And as said, the more maps come out (and this issue gets delayed) the bigger the work will be with synchronizing all together. This is ultimately a question of policy, much like module quality is, for example.

 

Let's see what time brings. 
 

@Stanlesuper You might want to link to this discussion (or add a two pictures (before - after)) in their bug tracker, and post your solution to it.

[Stanlesuper]

50 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

 

@Stanlesuper You might want to link to this discussion (or add a two pictures (before - after)) in their bug tracker, and post your solution to it.

Will do in "bug section"

[zerO_crash]

4 minutes ago, Stanlesuper said:

Will do in "bug section"

Good stuff

[Hotdognz]

On 5/22/2024 at 1:00 AM, Stanlesuper said:

You can try both of them:

Modified LUT preset orange and orange 2 in attached files, just backup your DCS/bazar/effects/LUT folder and replace those two .png files.

It works great even on desert maps like sinai, also channel map ...

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for this saved Kola map from the bin

[T.Power]

Stanlesuper's LUT creates some very odd lighting in the Hind at night unfortunately, it's not useable.

[aceviper]

If you are using VR and openxr.....in the toolkit menu system page...color gains...put the red down to 48.

This small change mutes the red color bleed in VR slighty and clean up the image to me.

Also desaturates the image to a much more real life like palette.

[Stanlesuper]

7 hours ago, T.Power said:

Stanlesuper's LUT creates some very odd lighting in the Hind at night unfortunately, it's not useable.

I mad those presets in 2minutes

I will update it and remove the dark red lighting 

[FR4GGL3]

On 5/20/2024 at 9:37 PM, skywalker22 said:

Green is just fine for this current month of the year, I love it.

This is the point!

It matters which month of the year and on which wheather you look at the landscape. I am from the south of Germany. Our greenest months are April and May. If there is a bright and sunny day the green is almost cartoonish in some areas (if the plants are healthy and don't suffer from calamities like a lot of the trees do). If you are in the height of the summer from End of June to Mid/End of August, there are sometimes dry periods. The whole landscape turns yellowish or brownish - very quick.

So it is best to use some kind of filters like Reshade. You can tune it to your liking or the month of the year.

Edited May 31, 2024 by FR4GGL3