Hugo Asm" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message
news:web.41b99b1d17a60fa4ba17f4dc0@news.povray.org...> > if I were you I'd
leave it as it is, because it
> > looks fine here.
>
> I like my images to look good on every monitor out there.

Which, as you'd already know, isn't possible - if someone has the brightness
turned right down, good luck seeing all of the nice shadow detail you put
in.  If they have it turned all the way up, the image is going to look
washed out.  That's why the safest bet if you want it to look good on a
range of monitors is to make it look good when viewed on a monitor with a
2.2 gamma response curve.  This is why my LCDs are calibrated using a
colorimeter to match a gamma of 2.2, which is why I was saying leave it as
it is - if it looks good on my monitor, which is set up to match a gamma of
2.2, then it should look good on "most" monitors that don't have their
calibration way out of whack.

Then again, most people have their monitors set to whitepoint of 9300 kelvin
*groan*.

> My guess is, the histogram shows a good spread of luminance because the
blue
> ground statistically covers up for the lack of contrast in the speaker.

I was talking about *just* the speaker - there's good luminance range even
when excluding all areas of the blue backdrop, in fact from 0% to nearly
100% (around 250/255 - i.e. ~98% luminance).

> It's tricky to achieve good looking, black materials, even more so in
> computer renderings. But a good starting point would be to find some
> reference photos of black things (possibly speakers) and work from there.

But his speaker cabinet isn't supposed to be black - I'd imagine, like most
Sony speaker units, it's probably "midnight grey".  At least my Sony
speakers are like that.  So, they shouldn't appear black (like the speaker
cones should, and do).

In my opinion, Alex's image already has very good contrast, and in this case
I think leaving radiosity on is a good idea - the cabinet is picking up a
subtle blue tint, and the area around the cabinet (e.g. at the front bottom
of the cabinet) is picking up a subtle grey tint.  Removing radiosity would
lose this subtly and make the image not seem as realistic (as our brains
will subconsciously pick up on these missing cues and tell us something is
"wrong").

Lance.

thezone - thezone.firewave.com.au
thehandle - www.thehandle.com

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