I'm a fan of darker images. Appeals to my dark side. Now, I often read messages about people who think an image is too dark and they can't see anything, or very little, in them. I don't quite get it. I've looked at the monitor tutorial here, and elsewhere. I rarely have a problem with seeing the details of dark images. Is it me, or are all you blokes out there not setting your monitors right? :) (Seriously. I check my darker images on both the Mac I create them on and the PC's I regularly use without trouble.)

I used to be a real grouch for this, one of my monitors is really old and past it, even with max brightness I lose lots of detail. In the end I bought a second hand monitor off my boss and relegated the 'dark one' to my server :-) .....

what I do is drop an 'globe' light close to the details I want to emphasize, click on the 'E' setting, and fiddle with the light intensity, shadows, color, etc., until I get what I want)..a very low light would show more detail, and still leave the picture dark..

The thing I hate most about Macs VS PCs is the different gamma. I now post 2 images, the original Mac version and gamma corrected PC (done with ImageReady) or rerender the Mac file on a PC (if we're not too busy at work). Best; Dan

Aye, but methinks we can escape all of this with internal color correctors, such as Colorific... Although I too feel silly when I take one of my images to a non-calibrated screen, or an older, greener monitor.

Proper monitor calibration is very important--not only for seeing the detail in darker images, but for seeing the correct colours in brighter ones. People spend a great deal of time texturing and setting a scene where everything works together, then more time setting light colours to complement the textures, and light intensity to set a mood, etc., but without proper monitor calibration, all that can be lost.

It's very important for me to have a properly calibrated monitor. I work with high resolution photos, orginal artwork (watercolours) and VERY OLD photos. The end result has to be perfect as with the DTP I do for a couple of charities. My current Packard-Bell 17" was too 'red' when I got it so I spent a lot of time re-calibrating. There is simply no-way I'm going to change it just to see someone's render. I would rather d/load and play with it in PSP... This however doesn't mean I think there is anything wrong with the works I have a problem seeing, nor do I think anything less of a Brycer's PC or monitor. I have on occasion, commented that an image is 'too dark'. But there is the rub! 99% of all the work you guys submit is perfectly visible on my system. It therefore follows that the work I have a problem with MIGHT actually be TOO DARK! Something the Brycer might want to correct/alter/change. I sincerely hope that you guys will tell me if there is something wrong with the lighting/brightness of MY work... regards The Bryster

I used to have people complain that my images were too dark, after a while I started checking into the monitor settings and found that my monitor was considerably brighter than most. Once I fixed that, and learned to keep Gamma correction turned off in Bryce rendering, I haven't had a problem, even with rather dark pics.

Attached Link: http://bryce-alive.net/calibrate/

I got a new printer last year (a cannon s9000) and it made me realise how bad the old monitor was. I've now calibrated the complete system, screen matches print exactly, EXIF works, etc, well worth an hours messing about.

This wasn't an attempt at pointing fingers at anyone. I just find it interesting that we all seem to calibrate our monitors to our own preferences. Interesting, is it not, that we end up with such a wide range of dark values.

O.K. I got the picts and put them into one bmp file in photoshop. Adjusted the heck outta my monitor with the software settings so that I could see all the divisions in all the color(and grey) scales. I was seeing waaaaaay to dark(especially in the blue range) so they would appear really bright to others. But I imagine most people's monitors are as out of adjusment as mine was or else someone woulda said something, wouldb't they??? I noticed a couple of the presets for my nvidea card said 9300 kelvin on them - but how do you adjust kelvin?

Biker:I can use the controls on my monitor to adjust the colour settings...

Bryster, yes I can too, but it is more of a coarse setting on my cheap ol' Pixie. For finer control the Nvidea Video card software does a much better job - on top of that I can save the Nvidea software settings,and in that way have as many different settings as I want. Now my settings appear to be right except the blue/yellow (blue color) which is hard to adjust on my monitor and it's a little cloudy, so I have some tweaking to do yet. but as far as I can tell I was off by a factor of fifty (too light) using photoshop's brightness/contrast adjustments. I like to play around with shadows and near dusk renders but if everything I've done looks like middle of the day what's the point? BTW: Thanks Agent Smith for the link to that site. those color calibration picts are going to come in handy! - TJ

Aye, we can thank Nvidia for all kinds of cool stuff. And the coolest toaster I've ever seen!!! (one of my GeeFours melted while playing Morrowind, and it was GLOWING before I realized what was happening and turned the machine off...) Luckily, some cool person at Nvidia or Creative had the foresight to include Colorific with my now-defunct Graphics Blaster Riva TNT. 16MB PCI card, but oh I had so much fun with it! And I've been uding Colorific ever since...

Thanks for the warning - I'll remember never to play Morrowmind. I've had pretty good luck with Creative Labs/ Nvidea.

No no NOOOOO! Morrowind is the greatest role-playing game of all time. Now, I know I say that every time a new one comes out, but it really is beautiful, and inspirational from an artist's perspective. The landscapes are vast and full of life and plants, and the skies are just ridiculous! The line between realtime and realistic graphics is fading fast. Morrowind, Sir Bikermouse, is a testament to this evolution. One cool thing to keep in mind, at least from my point of view, is that if done properly all of our scenes can and will end up as tomorrow's gaming/immersion levels and worlds. Even Bryce's lack of export power is meaningless in the face of future programming power. We will make or have programs that do these conversions... But methinks the reason that particular Geforce 4 became molten was because it was an older model, with only a heatsink and no on-card fan. Pushing trillions of polygons at a preposterous resolution. I've never had any such problems since...

(sorry about being so off-topic, everyone!) (rambles at times)

SDL, That, and your electrical outlet might not have been properly grounded and/or you might have been experiencing very high atmospheric temperature and humidity. I used the exact card you were talking about for 3 years on a P2 233. I think I finally messed up the motherboard/pci buss by improperly connecting a usb connection - but it may be ok now that I removed the improper connection; It WAS a tremendous excuse to upgrade to a P4 using a TNT2 M64 W/32 meg. A friend has a couple of old vga monitors he's not using - I might try to get the old one going again if i can talk him out of one of those. ... If I get a chance to get morrowmind cheap I'll give it a try - It'll have to go a long way to beat half-live though. ... So anyrate after considerable tweaking I realized that I need to set my monitor settings in relation to blue as there is no hardware setting for that on my (cheap) 17" Pixie monitor - I'm still a little off but I'm closing in on it. I think higher contrast and brightness and lower red and green on the hardware settings, is a start and then adjust down on the software starting with blue and working up to red. - TJ

err Half-life; I just washed my hands and... well, you know how that goes.

Attached Link: http://colorific.com/c1.htm

I dl'd something called 3d deep from that site that seemed to do the trick. it kept asking me to increase the gamma as my monitor had "an unusualy low gamma". at 3.2(halfway up) I let it go and just pressed continue - the colors, although close in appearance to what I had after tweaking them, seem much better now! (still just a little cloudy, but much, much better. if I inreased the just gamma a little more I could probably get rid of the slight cludyness as well.) Thanks SDL, - TJ BTW: this looks like it will work for most of you on a pc running windows as well.