Lighting and color - truly amazing the influence
daveso
Posts: 7,809
in The Commons
I've been plugging in diefferent lights to a scene ... it changes so much its incredible. It makes you ask, what is the REAL color of this?
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Real colour?
Well, without light there is no colour; colour is about the interaction with light, the structure of the item we are looking at; our own colour perception, and I could go on.
In a render such as IRAY, the colours you get from a given set of lighting conditions are going to be accurate, but they will vary - as already said - depending on the light.
Just like photography; colour of light varies ... sunlight vs. shade, fluorescent vs. tungsten ... things even pick up the reflections of nearby objects. There is no "real" colour; it's just what you find pleasing and harmonious to your image concept.
Lighting temperatures are also something to be considered. Iray lights have a temperature parameter, which will give a subtle (or not-so-subtle) colour cast to your lighting setup. Monitors, too — they need to be calibrated to the ambient lighting your computer is in (although this is less of a problem with modern monitor technology) otherwise you'll be wondering why everyone else thinks your renders are either washed out bright or gloomy and dark.
light is always one of the main characters in a good scene.
The NVIDIA people have been playing around with lighting and colour, and a whole lot of other stuff that I don't pretend to understand.
Adversarial Networks
No doubt lighting designers have exacting specifications for at least a portrait studio they refer too. Like any specialized profession their are probably books of nothing but technical recipes create lit environments of different sorts. I think if you render in iRay and use the default iRay .hdr file that comes pre-loaded with DAZ Studio you'll get closer to the intended color of 'whatever'.
That would be an interesting question for the PAs and DAZ Studio what lighting they use to create their products. We know they ain't creating these products with simulated black-lights/black velvet neon glow wall posters.
Lighting products would be a little different but since we are talking iRay lighting products should still be tested to see if they additively combine correct with the DAZ Studio default iRay .hdr lighting file.
Many years (*cough* decades) ago, I worked over the summer in a small photography shop. We would send off films to be developed or photographs for copying. I remember one man who came back with a complaint because he wasn't satisfied with the quality of a copy. The picture was of him on holiday standing on a beach in shorts. The copy looked fine, but on the original his skin was a sun tanned bronze colour and on the copy he looked just as he did in the shop. We sent the photo back with instructions to colour match and he was happy with the end result, but I'm pretty sure that the copy was likely to be more accurate. Colour and lighting in photographs does not always follow the real world, and our brains are very adaptable to the concept of how something looked when we took the picture.
Overall, it's a matter of taste and artistic interpretation, but it is a very interesting area.
We're talking about 'realism' here but what I've been 'studying' lately regarding color is the paintings of certain masters as demonstrated in Dynamic Auto-Painter Pro (which I'm loving) and noticing the color changes vs the original render--not just overall due to lighting (like algorithms based on Rembrandt) but actual palette changes. Some kept color true to 'reality', others did not and it can be very very effective (surprising and beautiful too).
One of my first jobs after university was working in a lab testing flourescent whiteners. We would get samples from companies all over the world and part of the job was trying to match the white of the sample with our own products. What was surprising initally was how many different "whites" there are (and learning to tell the difference took a while), but what I found more interesting is that the idea of white varies from country to country. Here in the UK and in the US we prefer a bluish white for items such as clothing, but the samples from India were a sort of light green colour. I suppose it's the same reason why televisions come with colour, brightness and contrast controls - we all see things differently to some extent.
Greetings,
I've had a whole running frustration with low-energy lights (LED, CFL, etc.) where the Color Rendering Index makes me feel...a little weirdly nauseous. I use halogens and incandescents whenever possible, because even a CRI of 94 is enough to screw with me, and make me feel like the light is just...wrong. But the good CRI light sources are slowly being eliminated, which is going to be really weird long-term.
-- Morgan
WOW... MediaChance is stepping up to the plate again finally. I wonder if their flagship product, Real Draw Pro will get a huge update. I have 5 but the UI is still very yukky as well as some of the tools are limited. Thanks for the heads up!