Attached Link: Morning Prayer

heya; i like darkness. :) but i'd have to say, this isn't dark enough. the campfire should be lighting up a circle on the ground around it. (try a spotlight straight down?) and it should be lighting the figure more from the bottom; this seems kinda front-lit. also i think the light should be more orange-coloured. go crazy and turn off all the lights except one spotlight and see what you get. yeah, probably WAY too dark, but see what you can do with it; don't be afraid to be too dark before you've seen what it looks like.

I tried the 1-spotlite-below-the-fire-1-above trick already, in fact a variant is there now, but I think I have to better adjust the falloff to make it fade rapidly at the edges. One problem is the campfire itself, but I may put some 'fog' over it to tone it down. Hell, I may put fog all over the place! I had been trying to use R Sharkey's Indian Headdress; it shows in the doc window but doesn't render! Anyway, this one bears some post work. When I finish it up I'll post it on my web page and notify all here with a thumb and link. I need some misc. rocks and stones! No Bryce = Pain.

This begs the question: do people on this forum do any sort of color correction or even gamma correction for their monitors? For the Macintosh this is called ColorSync. On Windows many video cards provide a setting (usually in the Advanced tab of the Displays control panel) to at least set the gamma correction. On my monitor, the image above is not at all dark. I can clearly see the fire, the smoke tube extending up, the trees all the way down to the base of their trunks, etc. How many people color correct their monitor?

Nice image MadRed - although I agree with you and bloodsong about the lighting. The ground around the fire should be illuminated. Although, looking at it, I realise that this is a Poser render (not Bryce) so that's not going to be too easy to do. Still a very nice picture though. As to gamma correction: always and on every monitor I work with :) I have no problem seeing all of the details in this image. Paul

A qwik footnote: This is the compressed 30K image. The uncompressed image runs almost 250K and has better detail, especially in shadows. The fire shines out to about 3 feet away from center, fades nicely. Damned compression! Re: Gamma correction - get the test-pattern color bars and adjust for your eyes. About a third of the way over from the right, the black stripe on the lower part has 3 gradations of black. If you can discern these stripes you have a gut-calibrated display, can only be beaten by a bench-calibration.

::Bites his tounge::

hey... last time i looked into any colour correction nonsense, you had to scan in a test colour photo, print it out, adjust your screen, scan in the print out... and all KINDS of weird crap! (since i STILL dont have a colour printer, they're outta luck!) i adjust my display the way i want it, and i want it so the black of the black screen is just as black as the blank parts off the edge of the screen. (on my last monitor, that was too dark, but this new one has better contrast, apparently.)