Often when I work on a graphic, it looks fine to me on my home computer. And since I seem to like night scenes, the graphic is dark but it is visible to me. When I get to work, the graphic is so dark that the detail is lost. I have tried adjusting my monitor but it doesn't seem to help. Then I hear from some people who can see the graphic okay, and others who can't see it because it is to dark to them. So setting aside the problem of the monitor, how do all of you create night scenes that imply darkenss without the graphic itself being dark....how do you do graphics that show up on a variety of monitor screens? Do you do it in postwork? Or use different lighting for your night time scenes? I have tortured myself with trying different options and I don't like the results I've gotten. Any tutorials anyone can share? I'm truly in the dark. Thank you!!! Oh, I have Poser 5 and Jasc Paint Shop Pro as my tools.

I have experienced the same problem, and only recently have come to what seems to be a solution for me. I notice in a lot of movies and tv shows where it is a night setting, that actually there is quite a bit of light and that darkness is suggested - often through the color of lights use, namely blue, to light the scene. Also, shadows tend to be harsher and the area of focus more brightly lit than the areas to be more obscured due to the effects of darkness. Also, blurring the details in the background seems to help. I might add to the above, I may also add more grey to material colors of the textures to make them more dull and subdued as would be expected in low light settings. Studying old b&W film noir movies has helped as well since most of these were shot to suggest darkness as the main atmosphere. Hope that helps some. :O)

Try use backlighting (shine a light behind the character so you outline it against the dark). Hope that helps :)

Thank you! Those are great ideas. I think I just got so focused on the dark, that I forgot how important the light is. I go forth to try again.

Now now! Take your seats. The young member meant no harm. She simply needs to see our counselors for some re-education.

[ ** A goon squad in cheap suits & dark glasses quickly ushers the outspoken member from the crowd. **]

Imagine, such an upstart daring to threaten our fragile concept of Fine Art on a CRT.

( where in reality, well never achieve the identical color twice. )

---------------- Quick Poll:

33 step grayscale above. How Many steps do you have to come up from black before you can distinguish a difference? (with your display right now ... just for fun, & a sense of what people actually look at -- so, no cheating by tweaking)

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This also raises an oft ask question, how dark is it -- really?
Here's a handy utility that will tell you the RGB values of any pixel you pass your mouse over. Free and tiny & not affected by monitor setup.

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html

The black closest to the border blends in for me, And it's difficult for me to see the last two whites, they're too bright, but I can still distinguish between them. Does that mean my monitors set o.k.?

Yup - the last box and the border are both Zero black (so they should blend). Ideally, the last two boxes at either end should just barely be distinguishable -- if at all. If you can see the dark ones clearly, you may have your brightness too high, or contrast too low :: & thus slightly washed out.

I often have comments of others work as being very dark. Looking at the bar I have marked the ranges I can see on both ends. Lots of my renders in poser come out dark, even with light packages that I have bought. Sooo now that I can tell I'm blind in the dark areas how do I change it? Just play with brightness and contrast til I can see the next to last bar in both ends??

Woohoo! Looks like my monitor is properly calibrated and the gamma is correct. Took long enough to get it that way. ;) bonni

<<Just play with brightness and contrast til I can see the next to last bar in both ends?? >> Yep, you start by setting contrast to 100% and then adjust the brightness until you can see all the blocks on this chart. This works fine with CRT-monitors. Don't know about TFT's. And then there is colors... I am never quite sure, if colors are properly displayed on my monitor.

Actually MachineClaw, on mine, I could see only one more box than on yours (clipping at 16% vs. 19%).

Id asked the question because I suspect (hereby screwing up the survey by predicting an expected conclusion) that most folks DO tend to normally run with their black levels slightly crushed. Meaning that if you rendered based on a correct monitor, your work would indeed appear too dark on the screens of most viewers.

Since posting this, Ive tweaked the brightness & contrast on mine to see all but the last two black boxes but not sure I like it this high (everything now looks just too damn bright & cheerful).

elizabyte mentioned gamma, but that's really not addressed here and would be a whole 'nother bucket of worms (hence the joke in the topic line in #5). So far weve only been concerned with the correct values for the end points of the grayscale. Gamma curves would refer to the nonlinear factor in the transition from black to white.

In other words, when Zero Black and 100% White look correct on your monitor, is 50% White still displayed at middle gray?
(see the pic above)

AFAIK, only fancy-schmancy monitors have user accessible Gamma Correction adjustments, (not the cheapies I use) but this only further points out the great unlikelihood of anyone ever actually seeing your work in the precise manner in which you intended it to appear.

It makes a lot of difference what your viewing conditions are. Images that appear to me very dark and unfathomable viewed in the day are as clear as anything at night.

My setting looks pretty good. Everything's distinct except the last two black boxes blend together. The last two white are distinct, but close.

whoa.. looks like mines perfect ... I can see all the ways to each end as distinct blocks...

Nance yep. I adjusted my settings and can see the bars now. As you said everything apears washed out and bright. I have a expensive pro monitor, I'll have to check into the gamma curves, their is tons of menus in my monitor dunno if I have that. the plus is even with the washed out and bright, I checked a lot of images that were very dark to me befor, and now I can see what's going on in scenes, and background details I could not see before. I guess I'll take the radiation this 21" is throwing off now.

a good way to calibrate your monitor, is to use a color printer, make a color image that squares of the 3 primary colors (RGB) along with several shades of black grey and white, each square with one free block beside it print this one out from your app, best with a true color profile if it is available for your printer (or best quality setting if not) now cut out the free blocks, and hold it up against your monitor (still with your painting app open and the same image shown), adjust brigthness, contrast and color so that the blocks match as good as possible. that way you get a WYSIWYG print view, and your color setting should be in par with your contrast and brightness setting (if i remember correctly, there are several of these color correction charts available on the net, some monitor manufacturers have them available on there websites), and this works for both CRT and TFT

And the beat goes on.... "So setting aside the problem of the monitor, how do all of you create night scenes that imply darkenss without the graphic itself being dark....how do you do graphics that show up on a variety of monitor screens? Do you do it in postwork? Or use different lighting for your night time scenes? I have tortured myself with trying different options and I don't like the results I've gotten." While the info on adjusting the monitor is certainly helpful and appreciated, I am interested in hearing more on the initial question posed in this thread. If anyone has more thoughts on how to simulate darkness in your renders, without actually having to make your pictures dark, that would be great to know. :O)

First of all, check the color temperature of your monitor. Almost all (but the most expensive intended-for-professional-graphics-work) monitors ship with a color temp of 9300K. This is becuase it looks good in a typical overlit, fluorescent-lit retail store. If you drop your color temp to a more correct/appropriate/calibrated/typical daylight 6500K, you'll have the "dark" problem relative to everyone else. But just 'cos everyone else has succumbed to monitor vendors' Marketing Dept., doesn't make it right ;-) Same effect can be seen with TVs. The typical settings out-of-the-box is way to bright for a low-light residential setting. A useful by-product of this 6500K setting on a CRT is longer useful life of the phosphor :-) Also remember too that Macs and PCs have different gammas, so anything created on a Mac is going to look dark on a PC even if the color temps are the same and even if they are similarly calibrated. Lots of viewer apps will let you change the gamma for a given picture.

A suggestion for making it dark without being too dark is to render it using 'night' lights at a slightly brighter setting and then adding 'gloom' via postwork. A black to white fade used to highlight the main figures or dramapoint of your image can be overlaid or multiplied in a secondary layer. I often use a slightly blurred layer of the image itself overlaid and then partially erased over the main area in addition to the fade(s).

I, too, would like some feedback on the original question - how to make things APPEAR dark, when they're not really so. My own 1st thought would be to make the scene fairly dim, with lowish contrast, but still bright enough to see easily. Then add some spurious additional (lighter) colour(eg. a lighted window; a "dusk" horizon; a (blueish) light from another room) - anything that fools the eye into thinking that the main scene is darker than it really is. Adding a lightish-grey (or gray) border might also help... (I think I'll go and experiment with those ideas myself, sometime soonish..) If you look at movies, they often use a similar technique, backlighting the figures with a blue light (which apparantly comes from nowhere). Whilst that can be got away with in movies, where the attention is on the action, not the lighting, stills would seem to need to be treated more subtly. Just a thought, and a hope that someone will come along with a tutorial:-)) Cheers, Diolma

Diolma, I think you have a good idea there...tricking the eye. It also never occured to me what Phantast suggested...that I am created in one light, and viewed in another (which is true). Many good thoughts here. :)

I just calibrated my monitor and I've got to say I'm now completely disgusted. I went back and looked at the images I did before, and eeewwwww! All the things I added in post (mostly hair and clothing) look like crap. Now that I've got a truer representation of what colors should really look like, hopefully my artwork will get better. Thanks, dialyn, for starting this thread because in it I found a resolution to a problem I didn't know I even had! :)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=FyreSpiryt

I know what you mean, SomethingWicked. I did a couple of pics (The Kiss and Tutoring at Xavier's) on an old monitor that had fallen out of calibration, got a new one, calibrated it, went to my gallery, and just about cried. The lighting in Xavier's I had worked so hard to get just right, thinking I was on a good monitor, was all washed out, and Rose's hair in The Kiss.. well, it had blended beautifully when I did it on the old monitor. Now, if I think of it, before posting a dark image, I add an adjustment layer that ups the brightness to get an idea of what it'll look like on a brighter monitor. Kind of a sanity check. On the "look like night" question, a lot of old movies used a blue filter. Just taped normally, but with a piece of blue cellophane over the lens. You can do the same sort of effect in postwork, or with blue lighting (or even in directly Poser, putting a semi-transparent blue plane in front of the camera). The catch is, and where a lot of MST3K movies screw up, is watch your shadows. If you have high-contrast, dark, very distinct shadows, it's obviously "day for night". Shadows should be lower contrast and fuzzy.