Just like in cinema, poor mastery of tonemappers like ACES these days really destroys contrast & saturation. Hence this omnipresent soft, bland, desaturated look.
Tail lights should never look like this. This is supposed to be pure saturated red.
This is why I previously tweeted about the "cinematography" of old racing games. The colorimetry, lighting, atmosphere felt "correct" and on point, despite the crazy limitations of the time (2MB RAM, 1MB VRAM, 33.8MHz CPU).
Here's how I would do it.
I've been obsessed about linear rendering for 20 years. I was pioneering 32 bits linear workflow in After Effects since it arrived in 2006. I study old movies shot by shot to see how neon & signage looks on film, as there is no digital clipping. https://x.com/timsoret/status/...
Clipping is not desirable. Here are several exposures I took in Hong Kong in 2015 with my old Canon 5D Mark I (2005). It shows the problem of narrow dynamic range: I can't protect the saturated highlights without underexposing the whole frame.
Compressing HDR into SDR isn't a trivial. Clipping, rolloff, hue shifitng, there is no perfect solution, only compromises. CG, games, cinema & photography, all have different solutions to the problem, & different jargon. Hollywood struggles with this since going digital.
Many "who cares" reactions. Well, pros care. I'd suggest this incredible paper on tone mapping to clear misconceptions. https://blog.selfshadow.com/pu... It's accessible, and explains the long history of tone mapping, from oil paintings, to CRTs, to OLED. Maybe I should do a thread.
@artntek Yes.
@andkalysh Which one is closer to natural vision? https://x.com/timsoret/status/...
@Beechbone Mist is an artistic choice, it's not poor color grading.
@SolomanbrX It doesn’t work like that. Tone mapping is a destructive operation, data is lost, it alters the relationships between colors & brightness, and can’t be restored by a post processing slider.
@spinelessaisha Actually colour science is complex, with fundamentally no perfect solution given current tech. We can't display the extreme dynamic range of reality 1:1 (no screen can blind you like the sun), so gracefully scaling down this range is full of perceptual trade-offs.