Why do my screenshots look too dark on other PCs?

Hello all,

I've been having problems getting screenshots from my game looking the same on other PCs. At first I thought it was the fact that these other PCs had Intel Extreme Graphics Cards (ie poor quality). Now I think that it is the gamma settings on my machine.



In the linked image above it *should* be easily possible to see the dark green grass, but not *that* dark. The blue strip (badly designed river) should be close to the same color as the default windows XP status bar.

Although I am thinking it may be my gamma settings are different to other people's on the few machines I've tried to alter the gamma settings on simply causes everything to become too bright and saturated.

I am hoping someone could help shed some light on this issue?

Thanks,
Matt

Your monitor is probably set up differently to theirs.

Try calibrating your monitor properly (microsoft now have a tool available for doing this), and get your friends to do the same.

Thanks GfK I'll try that and see how I go.

I can see it as you describe. Do your friends have TFT monitors or LCD? LCD monitors don't contrast as well and black tends to show up lighter, if that makes any sense.

AdamJ is right, although its not impossible to calibrate TFT monitors its certainly more tricky to get it right.

I do a lot of photographic work and although my TFT is calibrated correctly now, it was a long time getting there and I wish I'd kept my old LG CRT monitor for that kind of stuff.

I am using both a CRT and a laptop LCD screen myself on which it looks fine on either (CRT connected to laptop as secondary screen). However the other PCs for which it looks too dark have CRTs and Intel Extreme video cards .

It's entirely possible that you've calibrated your CRT to match your LCD rather than to the standard settings, this will probably skew your perceptions of the graphics.

I have a CRT that's properly calibrated and a Geforce 7600.

The pics look too dark on my system, and it's no wonder. If I load the pic into photoshop and look at the levels, it shows most of the colors are below 64, and fully half of them are below 32!

I adjusted the image close to what I think you meant to achieve on my monitor:



It will probably look much too bright on yours.

Btw,a properly calibrated monitor will have the contrast turned all the way up, and the brightness turned down until just before the darkest shade of gray becomes indistinguishable from the normal black background. So make yourself a 1,1,1 gray square and stick that in the middle of a black background and view that full screen and adjust your monitor with it.

If you still have problems you might be running adobe gamma and that might have screwed up settings. It's a peice of crap that program. No way to go back to the defaults, and it affects itself, so if you run it after having used it once, the second run will produce different results!

Thanks Sswift, the altered image you posted looks the way I intended it to look on mine. It is only marginally brighter than the one I posted at the top of the page.

I haven't used any calibration programs yet fortunately, so I'll try what you suggest.

- I just tried what you said (Contrast 100, Brightness on monitor set such that a 1,1,1 grey square is barely visible on black background) - and now it seems to be correct. My original image is now too dark (which is a good thing) and your altered image looks as it should (very similar to my original image).

I guess I'll have to render things again now.

Thanks,
Matt

sswift's image looks much better the other one is horrid and dark.

There may be calibration tools that you should use. Or you may use a simple program to visually calibrate the brightness of your screen, do something like this:

graphics 512,512,32,2
setbuffer backbuffer()
for i=0 to 255
 color i,i,i
 rect i*2,0,1+i*2,graphicsheight(),1
next
flip
waitkey()

Now adjust the brightness of your monitor until only white is white and only black is black.

Well if its close to the same colour on your monitor, wont it still be close to the colour on my monitor, no matter what gamma sttings? Unless its the actual screenshot function that is wrong

Mmm, I think I can rectify this - email me the source code (and all media) - I can used 'ATI's color balance recurser' on it.

I'll wait here - email in sig.

does anyone ever actualy fall for that

He will crack.

Ahh, so they weren't supposed to be that Dark! I just assumed it was a dark level kind of like Dungeon Keeper's.

sswifts altered image looks much better.

You may want to make sure that your monitor is working properly. What make is it?

LOL, not going to say anything LOL. OK, dont crack.

Hi,

Grey - I agree totally, however sswift's image is what mine looked like on my own machine.

jfk EO- 11110 - thanks, that's pretty much what sswift suggested so hopefully I can make my monitor match everyone elses....

puki - so what is it you are after - the 2d media( the game is 2d) or the original 3d models?

Amon - I think my monitor works okay it is some SyncMaster thing I think - but the image looks pretty much the same on both my Laptop screen and the CRT screen (although the white on my laptop is more of a beige/off white color when comparing them closely).

H&K - I'd like to think it was the blitz screenshot function used (savebuffer) but I doubt that would be it. One way to confirm it would be to download the demo I posted in the blitz showcase area and let me know if the colors look wrong on that as well.

Anyway thanks all for the helpful responses..

Sswift - would you be able to let me know what you did to correct the color on my image? Did it simply involve adjusting brightness/contrast/gamma? In other words would it be possible for me to just run my images through a batch image processing tool like IrfanView to correct the color?

Sswift's image looks *much* better on my screen than the original. (Radeon 9600)

That said, I tend to keep my screens a tad on the dark side, since it's a lot less eyestrain than when it is 'properly' calibrated.

I believe how your room is lit can affect a bit aswell.
Many times I've done textures and renderings during late night hours in a dark room and the next day the pictures are so dark I can barely see what's in them.

We even have a name for that; "kellari gamma" = basement gamma... People at remedy started out working in a basement / cellar without windows and all the levels they did come out pretty dark... same happens when you work at night without lights on. I always have ambient lighting on when working because of that (it gets pretty dark in Finland during fall / winter evenings and nights).

Matty:
What I did was edit curves in photoshop. If you had photoshop you could batch process it, but I couldn't tell you exactly how I adjusted the curves. I wouldn't do what I did anywy though because I had to do a non-linear adjustment to try to bring out the darkest patches without killing the stuff that's supposed to be black. Ie, the result you'd get if you just turned up the brightness slider.

Also what I did didn't result in a very pretty image. I mean look at the dark shadows, how the gradient is fairly sharp. Like at the top right. And the gradient on the character icon too is now off.

But you could try doing a linear edit and see if that works out for you. What I mean by that is using standard brightness/contrast adjustments, rather than making funky shaped brightness curves. To do that, just increase the contrast and brightness slowly making sure to keep the blacks black until you get the bright stuff to the point it needs to be. Or if you can do levels then you could do a more sane non-linear adjustment and slide the middle slider to the left to bring up the midtones. But in my experiments I don't really think that either of those will brighten up the dark areas enough.

Oh and when I did that adjustment I also had to increase the saturation a bit because what looks properly saturated when dark looks desaturated when lighter.

Thanks sswift, I've played around with the brightness/contrast on my CRT monitor which has helped a great deal (now my original image looks as dark as it did on everyone else's PC and yours is much closer to what I had in mind).

Thanks,
Matt