[MetinSeven_com]

Hi guys,

Did anyone also notice that the colors in Maxwell renders have become a little more saturated overall since (one of) the last update(s)? The renders look more like V-Ray and a little less photorealistic / more CGI than they used to look.

I had to re-render a scene I had already rendered with an older version, and the difference in saturation was clearly apparent. Could this be due to the last Maxwell Fire update? The main renderer seems to have been adjusted as well, because the saturation is present in both the Fire preview as well as the actual final render.

[Half Life]

The colors have been consistent for me in 2.x releases -- but 2 in general is better on color than 1.7 which had some issues with getting the color you put in back out accurately, especially with saturated hues.

In general my experience is older materials in the gallery exhibit very highly (too high) saturated colors to compensate... but one interesting thing I have seen on the old simball scene is you need to re-save the scene from studio as a 2.5 or the scene will render oddly.

It could be all you need to do is open it in Studio and save it back out.

Best,
Jason.

[NicoR44]

Not at all Metin, could you post an example?

Cheers, Curt.

[MetinSeven_com]

Thanks for your replies guys.

Here's an example of a toy sculpture I created. The top image is rendered using 2.0, bottom one rendered using the very latest Maxwell update that includes Fire. The scenes are the same (decor, lighting, materials, the works).



The saturation seems to increase especially with colors that go towards yellow.

In this render I created today I had to decrease the saturation of the yellow color afterwards using Photoshop, because it looked like cheap old school oversaturated CGI (and it still looks non-realistic):

[Half Life]

That is interesting -- did you notice in the new version that the outside of her eyes are black and the falloff on the right side of her hair is different (like the light got moved down)?

My general rule of thumb is to not use anything with a saturation exceeding 225 (same with brightness) -- but I do see what you are talking about.

Just out of curiosity have you tried outputting the MXI file in different color spaces (ie Adobe RGB 1998, etc)? It may clear up the issue as this looks like sRGB color over-saturation to me... you would see the same thing if you convert a photoshop document from Adobe RGB 1998 to sRGB alot of times -- it is a result of mapping a larger more subtle colorspace to a tiny colorspace like sRGB. It has all kinds of nasty artifacts like loss of detail and in extreme cases subtle posterizaton.

You could also try outputting a HDR file and converting that to 16 then 8 bit in photoshop... which is what I tend to do when detail is critical and I want to do alot of post.

Best,
Jason.

[MetinSeven_com]

Hi Jason,

Many thanks for your tips, I'll surely try them, although I've always used the default sRGB color space settings, and hope the saturation issue is not due to a modification of the Maxwell render engine since Fire was introduced.

Have nice weekend y'all!

[Half Life]

The general rule of thumb is you want to use sRGB for the web and use Adobe RGB 1998 for print (for converting to CYMK) -- but obviously exporting at 16-bit or 32-bit means more of the color/value data is kept intact and will show less degradation with repeated post/editing operations.

Starting with an 8-bit sRGB file is really a bad idea -- I would only output 8-bit sRGB if I planned to just use the raw render for web display only... but generally sRGB is considered a destination colorspace only (not a working one).

Obviously if you are working in animation/video then different colorspaces would apply (though sRGB is used on alot of modern HD TV's).

I'm not sure any of that is the culprit here as there have been changes to the render engine that may have more fully revealed the underlying color (previously roughness could lead to duller colors in certain materials in certain circumstances) -- and I have noticed the yellow/orange hues to be more true to the input color especially in SSS materials as a result.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Also, sometimes I will set the "burn" parameter in the Tone Mapping down to about 0.6 -- which helps for overexposed areas... that may be the quickest fix here.

Best,
Jason.

[tom]

Metin, your comparison doesn't seem to have the same illumination. Could you please check it? Such difference is not expected in any way.

[Lars Magnusson]

For the Toy, if it used Subsurfacescatter, maybe a difference could be seen since SSS has been reworked/fixed?
But since you also have a problem with the barrels.....

About colorspace... does the MXI result really care about that (doesn't it contain more colorinfo than HDR)?
Isn't the profile only applied when image is saved as for example jpg,tiff ?
However, if the topdoll was saved with AdobeRGB profile and the bottom was saved with sRGB (or the opposite...not sure in this case), it might be the cause since AdobeRGB looks flat when viewed outside software that supports it.

When I started DSLR photography I read that AdobeRGB was so much better and set the Camera and Photoshop to use it...as HalfLife said, it gives really nice result when printing....but after a couple of times when I forgot to convert/re-save into sRGB before posting on internet or emailing and people commenting on the "flat" look, I permantently switched to sRGB

Another factor can also be if you've upgraded/reinstalled or changed settings in for example Photoshop since depending on settings it might convert colorspace without asking you.

[MetinSeven_com]

Thanks for your tips guys!

Tom, it might be that I changed the position of the lights in the scene just a little bit in order to adjust reflections in the eyes, but I did not change the materials or light brightness.

Anyway, if the saturation issue can not be caused by a change in the Maxwell renderer, I'll try the colorspace and burn tips first, before jumping to conclusions.

[micheloupatrick]

Regarding the two doll pictures, it really looks to me as if different profiles were applied to the pictures.

[MetinSeven_com]

I never changed the default color profile settings in Maxwell, unless the default Maxwell color profile has been changed in the latest update.

[Lars Magnusson]

Do you have any software that can tell you which profile the images contain?

If you have PhotoshopCS# you can use AdobeBridge and check the metadata, and for example, when uploading a picture to Flickr one can check the EXIF data that contain profile info.

I'm at work now with WinXP and it doesn't look like explorer can show it directly through properties but maybe win7 can?

And the below is completely pointless if your images are directly out of maxwell and haven't been opened/saved in Photoshop (or similar):

If you're using Photoshop, check the settings in Edit-ColorSettings ( similar should exist in PaintShopPro, Gimp... etc)
( I'm still trying to figure out what setting I should have for PS CS4 to prevent it from messing up 16bit displacement maps....can't understand how to turn off greyscaleprofile completely?)

[Half Life]

If you're using Photoshop, check the settings in Edit-ColorSettings ( similar should exist in PaintShopPro, Gimp... etc)
( I'm still trying to figure out what setting I should have for PS CS4 to prevent it from messing up 16bit displacement maps....can't understand how to turn off greyscaleprofile completely?)

Hey Lars, are you having greyscale issues on opening the file or saving?

I'll post this for CS4 color management:
http://www.adobepress.com/articles/arti ... ?p=1315593

Best,
Jason.