Why do my pictures come out so bad?

[SirDuck]

Alright, so I got a new monitor and it is much better quality than my old one. Problem is, pictures I thought were fine now have glaring issues coming out of them. Can you guys and girls help me point out what I can do to fix them?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=519513444
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=518431157
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=509250172
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=507479796

[R234]

Can't be that glaring, looks fine to me.

[celica soupra]

I think the FoV in the second one is a bit too high and the lighting doesn't do much to separate Heavy from the background.

You might benefit from a few more zombies in the third. I understand you're going for a freeze frame in the middle of some intense action but there's only two zombies. There's definitely space for a tank, even if you think otherwise.

Lighting on Spy needs to be better in the last one. It just looks like a default white light from the front at the moment.

[raptornx01]

yeah, really need to reduce the FoV on the first three. and consider practicing the rule of thirds a bit more, which could help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

its not ALWAYS necessary, but sometimes can help.

[SirDuck]

Guys, when I said quality, I meant why do they keep coming out in low quality? Not why am I so terrible at making sfm posters.

I render them in 1920X1080 as a PNG and TGA

And yes, I am aware of my horrific lighting.

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

Guys, when I said quality, I meant why do they keep coming out in low quality? Not why am I so terrible at making sfm posters.

I render them in 1920X1080 as a PNG and TGA

And yes, I am aware of my horrific lighting.

What is your new screen's resolution? If you have a huge monitor bigger than 1080p, you will notice problems that you could not notice before on anything lower than that screen's resolution.
Another reason why you might be seeing differences in colors/lightness or whatever you see as a "glare" is because your color settings on that monitor might not be set correctly.
I have a crappy 4:3 screen with 1280 x 1024 and I don't see what you think is low quality at your posters.

[SirDuck]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

What is your new screen's resolution? If you have a huge monitor bigger than 1080p, you will notice problems that you could not notice before on anything lower than that screen's resolution.
Another reason why you might be seeing differences in colors/lightness or whatever you see as a "glare" is because your color settings on that monitor might not be set correctly.
I have a crappy 4:3 screen and I don't see what you think is low quality at your posters.

I have two 1920X1080 monitors. The brightness is much better on my new one, letting me see these huge issues I didn't notice before in regards to how grainy the picture is

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

Originally posted by Detonatress:

What is your new screen's resolution? If you have a huge monitor bigger than 1080p, you will notice problems that you could not notice before on anything lower than that screen's resolution.
Another reason why you might be seeing differences in colors/lightness or whatever you see as a "glare" is because your color settings on that monitor might not be set correctly.
I have a crappy 4:3 screen and I don't see what you think is low quality at your posters.

I have two 1920X1080 monitors. The brightness is much better on my new one, letting me see these huge issues I didn't notice before in regards to how grainy the picture is

Reduce brightness then. I can notice banding in skies and other stuff if I were to increase brightness here. Most of us don't see any graininess in your pictures.

Also, what depth of field did you render at? 512 pretty much removes all graininess so if you haven't used that, try it.

[SirDuck]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

I have two 1920X1080 monitors. The brightness is much better on my new one, letting me see these huge issues I didn't notice before in regards to how grainy the picture is

Reduce brightness then. I can notice banding in skies and other stuff if I were to increase brightness here. Most of us don't see any graininess in your pictures.

Also, what depth of field did you render at? 512 pretty much removes all graininess so if you haven't used that, try it.

Highest render settings possible.

And I dont want to change my settings, I want to know how to improve the SFM settings so the picture looks good on my screen

[celica soupra]

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

I dont want to change my settings, I want to know how to improve the SFM settings

You don't want to change the settings, but you do at the same time??

Remember, not everyone's monitor displays everything the same way. The fact that you are the only one who sees these graphical issues might mean your monitor is the most anomalous here.

Also, it would help if you told us exactly what you thought was wrong with them...

[SirDuck]

Originally posted by 64GIGS.exe:

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

I dont want to change my settings, I want to know how to improve the SFM settings

You don't want to change the settings, but you do at the same time??

Remember, not everyone's monitor displays everything the same way. The fact that you are the only one who sees these graphical issues might mean your monitor is the most anomalous here.

Also, it would help if you told us exactly what you thought was wrong with them...

I can see the grains and apreture. Its like the picture is on the lowest setting possible with AO all the way up and apreture all the way up.

And I dont want to change my monitor settings
I want to change my SFM settings so it looks good on my monitor

[celica soupra]

I don't see any grain in those images. What do you mean you can 'see' the aperture? Do you mean the depth of field? You can change that easily in SFM with the focal length, aperture and DoF samples.

[SirDuck]

Originally posted by 64GIGS.exe:

I don't see any grain in those images. What do you mean you can 'see' the aperture? Do you mean the depth of field? You can change that easily in SFM with the focal length, aperture and DoF samples.

When the apreture is too high it looks messy:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498150886

This one should be a more clear example of apreture overdose.
But my new monitor shows i've been putting too much apreture on everything

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

Originally posted by 64GIGS.exe:

I don't see any grain in those images. What do you mean you can 'see' the aperture? Do you mean the depth of field? You can change that easily in SFM with the focal length, aperture and DoF samples.

When the apreture is too high it looks messy:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498150886

This one should be a more clear example of apreture overdose.
But my new monitor shows i've been putting too much apreture on everything

Increase depth of field to 512, decrease aperture to 1/4th. And if that's too blurry, decrease to even less, until you're happy with it.

[R234]

Originally posted by Sir Duck The 74th™ | trade.tf:

When the apreture is too high it looks messy:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498150886

This one should be a more clear example of apreture overdose.
But my new monitor shows i've been putting too much apreture on everything

This one has way lower aperture than the other ones. It does however have a very low amount of DoF samples, contrary to the other ones.

The other ones really don't have anything wrong in terms of image quality.