Something is bugging me. Namely the question why there's spent so much time in
improving radiosity, sslt, photons etc. while an essential thing is still
missing in my eyes. You can use the best radiosity and area light settings and
end up with a render that is still looking somewhat artificial.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it a fact that povray has always suffered
from a linear lighting model?
My eyes are longing for a little bit of non-linearity :)
And I don't think it would be that hard to implement into the main program. As
far as I know Megapov has such a feature, called 'tone mapping'.
I found out a way to simulate this in the official version, it's a bit dirty but
it works for me.

The trick is to reflect the whole scene in two small spheres centered at the
camera location and make use of the 'exponent' keyword to control the light
intensities. (I call it a dirty solution because I don't think that it would
work well with focal blur, although I haven't tried it yet)

I don't know if this is pysically correct in any way, but the resulting renders
look more authentic and believable to me than general pov renders.
And as a positive side-effect, the images look more colorful and less
'washed-out' as you can convince yourselves by looking at the attached images.

Here's my... dirty... code :)

sphere {
    CAMERA_LOCATION, 0.01 // small radius
    pigment {color rgb 0}
    finish {
        reflection {
            1.35 // overall image brightness
            exponent 0.87 // non-linearity        }
    }
    no_reflection
    no_shadow
}

sphere {
    CAMERA_LOCATION, 0.001 // smaller radius
    pigment {color rgb 0}
    finish {
        reflection {1}
    }
    no_image
    no_shadow
}

Regards, Florian

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