Does Gamma and Saturation Influence your Mood?

To be perfectly honest, I’m no doctor….

I just love to play with all DAZ options….and Iray has a lot of settings…..

Giving the right mood to an image is always a challenge. Even if you get the right set of lights, you want to achieve something special that really matches your idea, the feeling you  want to have when they look at your render…

I was doing a render yesterday, and it just didn’t have the right mood in it. Usually, I would correct this in 3Delight by adding an ambient light…but, in Iray….There is no Ambient….

So, back to my render settings where I remembered where I had seen one thing in the Iray lightning training from Dreamlight: You can play with Gamma and saturation. So, I jumped in to and started to tweak..

The Journey:

This is the base render

This is a simple scene with no lights, just the environment settings set to “Dome and Scene” with the default settings and a black background.

What we want to explore is the ability to change the mood directly with the environment options:

I started to play with 3 settings: Saturation, Gamma and ISO.

My goal was to get a warmer looking image with more contrast without having to correct it later in Photoshop.

So, I started by tweaking Gamma

Original render (gamma 2.2)                       Gamma set to 1

Too dark, but something that was starting to look at what I expected

I adjusted it by 0.5 steps to see what the result would be

2.2 is the default, so, I set it to 1.5, 2 (just under default) and 2.5 (just above)

Finally, 1.5 was near the result I was after, so, I decided to go on saturation.

I set gamma at 1 and tweaked the saturation to see if a combination could give a better result.

Gamma 1-Saturation 1 (default)

Saturation is very sensitive

Giving more saturation leads to a reddish tone and lowering produces a blueish one

As the result was not the one I wanted, I created a simple environment map to replace the default one:

Nothing complicated, just a colored gradient to get some additive effect to the environment light,

Here is the result of the test:

For the health, I do not know, but for renders, Gamma and Saturation can really influence your mood!!

To go further:

If you want to know more about all those Iray tricks and completely understand how to get the best of Iray for your renders, have a look at:

https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-pro-lighting

HDRI maps :

If you are a texture creation addict, then, you can create your very own HDRI environment maps (and all your other textures) with this powerful software:

http://www.daz3d.com/genetica-3-6-pro

NB: This product has been upgraded to version 4 now.

Happy rendering!

Pierre

Pierre-Marc Andrieu

Fly028 is an accomplished 3D C.G. enthusiast. He has been creating content for DAZ Studio and Poser. Fly028 collaborates with DREAMLIGHT on trainings and content development which he has done for some years now.