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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperArt (Moderator: JWK5)I need feedback! (especially from pros - color/darkness issue)
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« on: August 01, 2014, 09:18:28 AM »

Hi guys, recently I've been working on a game with my friend and before starting a devlog I wanted to get feedback on a simple but serious issue.

In general we want the game to be dark and we want to achieve it by using dark colors, but we've already gone too dark once. Now I've brightened it up and in a dark room it looks perfect - not too dark, not too bright, but in daylight it looks rather dark.


So I need your help. Please tell me what are your impressions of this image's brightness and please include information about whether you were watching it in daylight or in darkness. (lamp light doesn't count as daylight)

Also if you know what kind of monitor you're using - that information would also help me (either model name or panel type (TN, IPS, VA)).

Another idea would be to increase the torch light radius, which we're probably going to do anyway.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2014, 09:32:46 AM by s-spooky g-g-ghosts » Logged

Mauricio Gomes
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« Reply #1 on: August 01, 2014, 09:42:57 AM »

I am on a soft daylight (no lamps on, just daylight, but my windows are facing the shadow side, and the day has some clouds).

My monitor sucks (it is those cheap LCDs that has some extreme colour deviations as you move your head below or above it...)

Your art well... It looks too hard to see the actual art, it feels like some generic dark art, because it is too dark to show details.

I don't think just increasing the radius of the torches will help, I think instead you should use colour mapping (ie: use colours with more light, but with hues that mean "dark", a example is games where night is shown by having deep blue colours, or daylight by using lots of yellow).

Also the bricks flatness don't help.

An example of night scene (Prince of Persia 1 for TurboGrafx)
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MHZkY5-ktrU/hqdefault.jpg
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Knives
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« Reply #2 on: August 01, 2014, 10:34:46 AM »

First off, this looks awesome Hand Thumbs Up Left

Anyway, the brightness looks fine on my end. I'm looking at it in daylight through a macbook pro 15 late 2008 edition, regular lcd display, nothing fancy, with the brightness setting half way, and I can see pretty much everything when in a medium lit room.

However, in a really bright room full of windows with the shades open, it is a bit hard to see without putting the brightness all the way up, but that's the case with every game I play in my bright ass room during the daytime.

I've struggled with this same problem too, and I think there is an optimum brightness you could shoot for, but ultimately, you can't make a dark game look perfect in all settings. Otherwise, you'd be sacrificing the atmosphere of the game, and I think players will understand and will have struggled with screen glare enough times to know that a dark game shouldn't be played in a bright room.

But I'm no seasoned pro so just ignore this.
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hammeron-art
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« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2014, 11:10:48 PM »

Before worrying about the player's room the main issue is the lack of contrast.
The scenary and the main subject are both desatured and that's why the guy above hardly see the art.

I did a quick edition:



Look at how those scenes are bright with high contrast but still dark:

http://www.nightcatchesus.com/images/photos/photo_03.jpg
http://s2.glbimg.com/_qPDeMCJ01uFuJOF7C-kqQlUrCQ=/s.glbimg.com/jo/g1/f/original/2013/06/10/the-evil-within-1369755785654_1920x1080.jpg
http://downloads.open4group.com/wallpapers/silent-hill-3-cena-do-game-2ef7e.jpg
http://plfoto.com/zdjecia_new2/1987369.jpg
« Last Edit: August 02, 2014, 11:16:38 PM by hammeron-art » Logged

Mauricio Gomes
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« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2014, 12:32:18 PM »

Whoa, hammeron edit look so much better Smiley

And yes, that is more or less what I was talking about (note the bricks are now obviously blue, and the torches obviously yellow, before everything was just a green-ish shade of grey).
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ryansumo
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« Reply #5 on: August 07, 2014, 06:01:23 AM »

I think if that blue could saturate the background just a little bit more this would really pop.
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #6 on: August 07, 2014, 06:47:18 AM »

Hey, sorry for not answering. This has been a real struggle for the past days. You see, it all came down to a method my friend came up with. We decided to try to create shadows and lights by applying a layer filled with black color. Next this layer was set to 40% opacity and it was lowering the contrast and desaturating everything (as seen above). After few arguments with him I created the image below and we're both happy with the way it turned out. It still will require some work, but it gives some insight.



And yeah, I'm quite familiar with that technique described by hammeron-art, but we wanted to remain in the style of a "painting". It's hard to describe for me. Anyway, what do you guys think of this? There will be more torches, it's just a mockup.
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Blambo
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« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2014, 08:06:05 AM »

I think if that blue could saturate the background just a little bit more this would really pop.

yo i concur
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #8 on: August 07, 2014, 08:19:09 AM »

I think if that blue could saturate the background just a little bit more this would really pop.

yo i concur
Do you mean the latest version as well?
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Blambo
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« Reply #9 on: August 07, 2014, 10:19:44 AM »

i was referring to the idea of putting a dark complementary color in place of the black or dark gray. the newest iteration looks cool though
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nilshier
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« Reply #10 on: August 07, 2014, 01:19:35 PM »

You generally want some Pixels at max (or near max) brightness, so either fully saturated colors or plain old white. Even if it's just 2 or 3 highlights! That's basically what contrast correction does in an image. Otherwise things look washed out.

Basically, imagine your eyes in a dark room. They adjust and a pale flame looks just as bright to you as a beam of sunlight might do in a bright outdoor scene. The feeling of "darkness" comes from color (nights are "blue") or dark/pitch black areas in the background for contrast (think Sin City!).

I love the pixel art, though!  Smiley
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #11 on: August 07, 2014, 01:36:45 PM »

You are absolutely right Shocked. I've ran the latest image through an Auto Contrast and after I change it back to the old way it does look very washed up.



Sure it's oversaturated in it, but it makes the point clear. I'll work on it now. Thanks a lot, you guys actually know something Grin
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Ashaman73
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« Reply #12 on: August 08, 2014, 01:44:56 AM »

A common way to handle this kind issues, atleast in 3d engines, is to add a final post-processing pass for color correction. I don't know what engine you use, but you can probably add it to any engine.

The basic idea is to use a look up table/texture (LUT) and map your RGB pixels to a new color. The RGB values are the "indicies" to the LUT, which contains the re-mapped new RGB color.

Implementing a LUT:
If you use some standard rendering API(OpenGL/DirectX), then you can save the LUT as 3d texture, using a shader to sample this texture. This is very easy and you get a lot of features for free (eg filtering).
If you dont use a standard rendering API it gets more complex, but not impossible  Wink

Workflow to create a LUT
First, create a standard RGB LUT, which maps RGB to RGB in a 1:1 manner (google or generate it yourself). A size of 32x32x32 is enough, you dont need 256x256x256(too large!).
Then take some screenshots of your game and use photoshop/gimp/whatever to add the RGB LUT as flat image. Then use colorshifting,saturation,constrat to adjust your screenshots until you are happy with the,. Finally extract the modified LUT, save it and use it in your game.

 Beer!
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nilshier
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« Reply #13 on: August 08, 2014, 09:25:56 AM »

For huge 3D scenes (or as a quick fix, indeed) color correction is maybe the only feasible method of getting things to look good. But I'd definitely try to do it without that! For pixel graphics you have the luxury of full control over each sprite, much more so than with shaded textures in a 3D scene. You can go in and fix this manually while creating the assets and save yourself an expensive color correction pass (not that it would force any modern hardware into its knees but it's always nice to skip a step).

Auto Correct just kinda stretches all brightnesses to fit into the full black-to-white spectrum. That can lead to over bright (and oversaturated) areas. Instead, just try painting on a few pixels of brighter highlights on, say, the armor of the knight, the torch or the head of the skeleton. Also make sure that whatever sprite you use for the light overlay around the torch lets through enough light towards the middle.

The "washed out" thing gets even more frustrating when you consider how badly set up most people's monitors are. They might play on a very cheap one in the middle of the day while a sunbeam is hitting the corner and it's impossible for them to see anything. Some horror games (say, Amnesia the Dark Descent) can get away with that but even those always have spots of brightness for contrast.
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #14 on: August 11, 2014, 11:25:52 AM »

Hey guys, thanks for all the advice. This is my current progress (in Photoshop, so it may differ a tiny bit in the game, especially the torch lights, please ignore the bridge and weird structures in the background and sorry for such a wide image)


I'm satisfied with the results, my friends don't really find anything wrong with it. I think that I've already spent enough time on it, it's time to work on other stuff. Thanks for helping me guys, I'd really struggle with this on my own. Lots of love Beer!

And nilshier, you're my official hero.
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RyanB
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« Reply #15 on: August 11, 2014, 09:57:01 PM »

I would go in a totally different direction.  Take a look at these examples.





I would give some similar examples from live action movies but my DVD collection is in boxes right now. 

Blue and high contrasts with localized lighting (torches, lamps, etc.).
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #16 on: August 11, 2014, 11:07:16 PM »

You mean you would tint everything blue in the shadows? That would result in a very very blue game. I used to like

but come on.

high contrasts with localized lighting (torches, lamps, etc.).
Wait.. did you see my last post?
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nilshier
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« Reply #17 on: August 12, 2014, 01:30:08 PM »

I think he meant that light color, in this case, isn't just decoration but something that we associate with "darkness" in general.

At night, it's all the light that manages to make it to us through the atmosphere. Air lets through more light in the blue spectrum than any other color. At day, enough light comes through for that not to matter (still, the sky is blue and shadows often have a blue-ish tint, still, since they're only lit indirectly from light scattered by the sky). At night that effect is more extreme because all light that gets to you has to somehow bounce through thick layers of atmosphere. Since blue is a primary color, intense blue swallows other color as well, everything gets a blue tint, even white or red objects (in fact, physically "pure" blue makes red objects look black because no light in its spectrum is reflected... but let's not even go there). Point is: This isn't "a blue paint job" for the hell of it, there's physics to this. And, because it's such an essential part of our world, quite a bit of psychology as well.

As a result, we associate blue with night and, further, with "darkness". That's why blue feels "cold", too. Same goes with yellow, fire and warmness.

The blue/yellow contrast would almost be a bit cliché (it works, though!), but it's always good to understand clichés and if it's only to break them more consciously. Wink
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #18 on: August 12, 2014, 01:58:27 PM »

I study at a university of arts and had many lectures on psychophisiology of sight (or at least that's what it's called here), I know exactly what you're talking about but there's no way I'm making my game blue, that's a completely conscious decision.

Unfortunately I don't know the English terminology for it as I'm not a native speaker, but
Quote
Air lets through more light in the blue spectrum than any other color.
we have those two kinds of receptors in our eyes and isn't it that one kind is sensitive for colors red green blue (of course that's a generalization) and it so happens that it's the most sensitive for blue and red/green (especially red) just rebel when the light becomes weak? I may be wrong here, but I'm not quite sure if "thick atmosphere" is the actual reason for things being blue at night.
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RyanB
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« Reply #19 on: August 12, 2014, 07:40:17 PM »

You mean you would tint everything blue in the shadows? That would result in a very very blue game. I used to like

but come on.

high contrasts with localized lighting (torches, lamps, etc.).
Wait.. did you see my last post?

Your palette is all over the place and the lighting is inconsistent.  Not really sure why the torches are green (mercury vapour?) and has no colour effects on the environment and characters.  Seems random.

Here's another example of high contrast with localized lighting:


Video of real-world torchlight:


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