[Rendering] Luminance (Brightness/Contrast) seems.. odd

[Ephemerous]

There are a couple sliders in the display options that I'd really like to be more useful (and may need a companion or two, like gamma and saturation):  Brightness and Contrast. 

First, in game example of the problems I'm trying to solve. I really like the art in Warframe, and I'd like to be able to see all the detail that the talented artists have added!  Looking out of my lander onto Jupiter, after setting everything to default, here's what I see:

The clouds are almost solid white... I'm sure there's detail in there somewhere!  After taking the regularly recommended step of disabling color correction, we get this:

This is way better!  Maybe since the background is mostly dark, the adaptive exposure is causing issues with a higher exposure..  maybe I should disable that!

Oof, this is way worse. It's possible I had these backwards; if the AE is focused on the planet (lowering exposure) and making the background too dark...  maybe I could keep AE and disable HDR (to minimize the differences!)

It's hard to see a difference here.  (I checked my screenshots a few times, feel free to try it out yourself to confirm!)  I thought well, if it's too bright, I'll just turn off all the fancy stuff (lower the difference by removing high dynamic range, and prevent any unexpected behavior from AE) and lower the brightness!

Okay, so we've lowered the bottom of the spectrum (and I can barely see my Warframe), but the bright bits are the same.. this seems more like a rising contrast at the bottom end than anything else, but okay.  Maybe I should lower the contrast to compensate!

... now I've lost detail both in the bright and in the dark.  For the record, the best I ever got was default settings (HDR + AE on) with color correction disabled.  In many cases this still leaves a huge amount of detail lost on the bright side of things (particularly in places like Jupiter defense) with other stuff hiding in the shadows. I really would like to see what the developers intended with color correction, but the loss of detail/impact on luminance is too high to leave this enabled.

 

Here's a visual of what brightness, gamma, and contrast accomplish in image editing software:

It looks like with Warframe, the controls seem to only handle the left hand side of the box (only impacting colors darker than 50%). You can bring up the shadows if your display runs darker, but there's nothing you can do about clipped detail in the bright side of things.  If the gamma on your monitor or TV is not ideal... well, you have to adjust it on the display if you can.

It would be wonderful if we could have the brightness/contrast controls affect the entire luminance range.  This would let us combine brightness/contrast to bring the detail in the brights back without losing detail elsewhere. (Even better if we could modify gamma and saturation!  That way people with darker monitors could see better, and people who want Samsung style popping colors could get that!)

If there's anything else I can do to help put this on the radar, please let me know; thanks for all of your hard work on the game!

Edited December 17, 2018 by Ephemerous
rehosting images, imgur links seemed to break.

[Myscho]

Dont forget about Bloom, which set at 10% is same as 90%