Any way to tweak rendering black-point to avoid black crush?

[Dan]

Having a colorimeter-calibrated VA-based panel that can reproduce deep blacks and darker shades accurately... it's driving me up the friggin' wall seeing the incredibly harsh black-crush in this game, especially when SSAO is turned on, as this makes it really heavily localised around the edges of objects, as the falloff on the SSAO effect is pretty harsh in itself, and in darker areas SSAO pushes those edges down to absolute black just about everywhere it gets applied.

It doesn't seem to matter what brightness (gamma) setting I select, black will always be harsh, clipped, posterized black. (The default 50% brightness value is perfect for overall scene brightness... it's just very easy to see the posterization when set to 100%)

I don't suppose there's any way to tweak anything outside of the presented settings, given the game appears to be a complete black-box when it comes to modding, but thought it might be worth asking.

I know it's not an intrinsic issue with the rendering, because the moment the slightest hint of dust or volumetric fog passes infront of the camera and lifts any dark areas up by a percent or two, the image looks far more balanced and natural. There's just a really harsh, seemingly hard-coded contrast curve in there somewhere that mangles any colour value approaching full-black.

If there was just some way to clamp the SSAO effect to a minimum 2% brightness or something, it'd probably look a lot cleaner.

Any ideas?

[Dan]

Hmm... incase anyone's interested, I found a passable hack to mitigate the worst of it - I created an extra calibration profile targetted to an artificially limted contrast ratio of 500:1, so it lifts the blacks a little. Rather defeats the point of having a 3000:1 VA panel with its lovely deep blacks, but at least it makes this particular game look a bit more natural overall.

[Vassago Rain]

The game has a very brutalist appearance. You probably don't have the colors on your monitor calibrated, either, if SSAO is causing you such immense problems.

I have a 120hz Eizo medical monitor, that's also a VA panel known for the fact that black is actually...black, and I don't experience the issues you are. On most VA panels, there's a dedicated game preset that turns off the backlight, and implements things like very high gamma. Turn off contrast enhancer, and run a more fitting temperature, like 9300k. Odds are you're at 5000k, which isn't really all that great for playing games at all.

Also turn off trash like ecoview, as it messes with the colors to save power.

Power save needs to be turned to off in the power manager, or you'll keep experiencing the flashes of it having all the color and vibrance, then going dull when the 'action' dies down. Configure colors as appropriate for your environment and gaming. If you have a proper, actually expensive one, you'll have dedicated software for this express purpose, or failing that, hardware buttons on the monitor.

[Dan]

Originally posted by Vassago Rain:

The game has a very brutalist appearance. You probably don't have the colors on your monitor calibrated, either, if SSAO is causing you such immense problems.

I have a 120hz Eizo medical monitor, that's also a VA panel known for the fact that black is actually...black, and I don't experience the issues you are. On most VA panels, there's a dedicated game preset that turns off the backlight, and implements things like very high gamma. Turn off contrast enhancer, and run a more fitting temperature, like 9300k. Odds are you're at 5000k, which isn't really all that great for playing games at all.

Also turn off trash like ecoview, as it messes with the colors to save power.

Power save needs to be turned to off in the power manager, or you'll keep experiencing the flashes of it having all the color and vibrance, then going dull when the 'action' dies down. Configure colors as appropriate for your environment and gaming. If you have a proper, actually expensive one, you'll have dedicated software for this express purpose, or failing that, hardware buttons on the monitor.

It's a fairly high-end Phillips monitor (10-bit per channel), which comes pretty accurately factory calibrated already, but I've also generated both a gamma 2.2 and an sRGB calibration profile (subtley different tone response curves at the shadow end) using my X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter - set to a target 120cd/m² brightness (set using the monitor control), CIE D65 white point (6500k - also pre-tuned using monitor RGB controls) and screen-native black-point (which is a hint lower than this probe can even measure, as the monitor exceeds a 3000:1 static contrast ratio).

I'm pretty certain it's accurately calibrated.

6500k is the sRGB standard... surely 9300k would be *painfully* blue-cast?

The sRGB tone-curve profile is theoretically slightly more accurate for non-ICM-aware software (like games), but it boosts the shadows slightly over the default gamma-2.2 tone curve profile, which makes the black-crush issue more pronounced. About the only way to minimise it is to either drop the gamma far enough that more of the colour range drops into shadow (which makes the game far too dark), or as I mentioned above, creating a profile with an artificially high black-point rather than the measured native black point.

About the best comparison I have is the recent Hitman game - I don't know if it's using some sort of physically-based-rendering approach, but it handles dark tones perfectly, without exhibiting any noticable banding/posterization in the shadows. So I'm fairly sure it's down to this particular game... and I get the distinct feeling it's because of some hard-wired post-processing they've got in there to boost contrast.