Airmarshal opened this issue on May 07, 2011 · 10 posts
ShawnDriscoll posted Sun, 08 May 2011 at 2:45 AM
Yes. In the old days (1990s), 1.8 was for PC monitors and 2.2 was for Mac monitors. Now it's whatever feels good. Vue 8 and before used 1.0 for gamma. So you had to brighten a render in Photoshop to use with other sources. The Sun is very bright at noon time. And gamma 1.0 never showed this fact very well. While 1.8 did.
So now it's the reverse in Photoshop. We're darkening our renders some to get those shadows in our scenes for that extra dramatic effect. Vue 9 and later let you play with the gammas on texture maps also. I just leave everything the same. My texture maps that I make myself are flat (brightness-wise) so they aren't overly bright when rendered at 1.8. Some folks want to render at 1.0 and have all their textures at 1.8. That's an artistic thing. Some accidently render at 1.8 and have all their textures at 1.0. That is more of an eye-sore thing. Everyone looks like they are under a shade tree in the middle of the desert at noon when there are no trees to be seen. Stuff like that.
Your goal in life as a desktop publisher (remember that job title? An '80s career thing people did on their Apple][) is to pick a gamma value and use that same number in all your graphical projects. So when you cut/paste images, no one can say, "Oh, they just pasted that spaceship over that canyon wall there using two different rendering programs." As an example. I'm not saying you did that (yet), but it will save you rendering time when you render your future objects in passes and then Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro them together.