The Grass and Vegetation colours are too light: Yes or No

[baronWastelan]

It was looking right 5 years ago. Did they throw all this out??

http://www.gamesaktuell.de/Storm-of-...1&i_id=1058760

[JG27_PapaFly]

Here's one other issue: i see many have posted pics of the landscape in question, most of them taken with P+S cams.

I do lots of landscape photography as a hobby, above and underneath water. That taught me not only to calibrate my monitor, but also my camera! Determining the hue of the colors we see outside is a very difficult task.

The only way a cam is going to record colors that are anywhere near the real colors is by shooting in raw and developing the files in a raw editor that has been calibrated for your specific cam (u do this by shooting a test chart and letting a calibration algorithm analyse the output). This essentially provides a calibrated cam.
And there still is the issue of exposure: even with a calibrated cam, your colors will look very different if you over- or underexpose a little.

P+S cams are very bad in this respect: not only are they inaccurate at recording colors, they also oversaturate the recorded colors by in-camera processing before tossing out an 8bit jpeg image with a narrow gamut.

Oleg is a photographer, he knows of all these issues. I can clearly see that he worked really hard to get the looks right in this sim, and he deserves our respect for that. This truly is a piece of art and looks way better than anything out there, sim or not.

What I'm trying to say is this: the matter is much more complex than anyone would imagine. You also want to find a setting that interacts well with the game engine itself, with the way it renders and with color range limitations.

S!

[bongodriver]

It was looking right 5 years ago. Did they throw all this out??

just looks like a photoreal texture thrown over a basic mesh, photoreal is fine viewed from an altitude but down low it looks awful even if you liberally sprinkle it with objects and trees, COD has managed to find a way to look good from high right down to ground level (despite the shade of green they used)

[winny]

If your colours are wrong fix your settings.

This was done using only Contrast and Saturation. And can easily be achived with most Graphics Cards control panel

I've posted this before.
The very right hand side of this pic is the original



EDIT : Sorry it's the middle one that's the original, the right one has green channel turned up.

[bongodriver]

If your colours are wrong fix your settings.

This was done using only Contrast and Saturation. And can easily be achived with most Graphics Cards control panel

I've posted this before.
The very right hand side of this pic is the original

now that's an interesting result, what were your settings?

[winny]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

now that's an interesting result, what were your settings?

For games I usually have high contrast and lower the saturation/gamma.

First I grab a screenshot and open it in Windows then have the graphics properties window open at the same time so I can get it right without having to switch apps.

It's not an exact science but my method is to take the colour out completely, increase the contrast so that things I know that are black in reality (Spitfire spinner for example) appear as black as possible without losing definition then gradually bring back the colour till you're happy.

You're desktop will probably look like s**t when you're done but just save it as a profile.

All this 'wrong colour pallete' stuff is not true. It's personal preference.

These are a result of only touching the contrast. No colour changes at all




The lighter bands are the original.

If you are happy with the way it looks then fine if not, tweak.

[JG27_PapaFly]

Originally Posted by winny

These are a result of only touching the contrast. No colour changes at all



The lighter bands are the original.

Problem solved.
Your shots also illustrate why Oleg chose a low contrast per default: he found a good compromise that displays the sunlit landscape and important details hidden in shadows. The instruments are pitch-black in the high-contrast image. Our eyes have a dynamic range that is far greater than that of any machine. In real-life, sitting in a plane we see both the landscape and the instruments without problems, and without having the feeling that there is no contrast. To achieve this in a game, or in photography, you have to lower contrast. IMO Oleg did the right thing here.

[Jotaele]

I allways use in the nvidia control panel, the digital vibrance(saturation), i put it to the 30 %, then in the green chanel, i down the brightness to the 40% , i use abit more contrast too or less gamma.Try it, the game improves drastically.

[baronWastelan]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

just looks like a photoreal texture thrown over a basic mesh, photoreal is fine viewed from an altitude but down low it looks awful even if you liberally sprinkle it with objects and trees, COD has managed to find a way to look good from high right down to ground level (despite the shade of green they used)

I agree, the textures look fine, just the colors are too candy-land. But with all those golds and yellows, I can imagine I'm flying over California

[BlackbusheFlyer]

Concur with many comments made above including Bongodriver, I have flown all over the UK over many years and the colours in the sim do not offend me. What I have seen change over the years is particularly in the south there is far less meadow and more planted crop.

I often had this argument in FSX, simmers seem to believe to be realistic you need to have fairly washed out colours. That just is not the case. England's fields on a clear sky day can be very vibrant and vivid (even more so than in CoD), when flying at 18,000 ft England is a patchwork of bright colour. Another belief is the sea should be very dark, in reality when the sun is out and winds are light it is largely sky blue.

I have been lucky enough to have spent most of my life flying and can only impart my observations.