'Tonemapping' issues in trailers and gameplay recordings of PoE2

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DasIstEmpy#7465 wrote:

The problem is not that yellow exists in the picture, but how it was arrived at.
There's artistic intent and there are 'accidents' or 'errors'.

As mentioned before, the 'errors' appear as inconsistent rate-of-change of the gradients, clipping (clipping isn't inherently bad, but if it's mishandled, it becomes an issue) and hue-shifts.

There is nothing wrong with a nice boiled egg, but if you were making an omelette and ended up with a boiled egg, it becomes a problem.

You can create a lovely transition from brown to yellow to white, without creating these 'flatspots' and irregularities.

So do I understand correctly that its not about the mix of yellow and brown but the yellow is lacking this gradient transition?

Guys if you want to improve your poe2 experience just get new monitor.. All screenshots on my oled look awesome!

I know its bad to say "just get new monitor" but that is always true. Monitors are biggest visual impact things you buy for pc or consoles. I recommend oled tech. I dont recommend qdoled or other types because i dont know how bad they are for eyes.

I know normal oleds are great for eye fatigue.

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

correct the yellow channel looks like a sine wave with the top chopped off. extreme example of this would be taking a picture indoors with a small portion of frame capturing a window during a bright day. the picture would loose the detail of what is outside as it would appear white. while the information loss here being minuscule in comparison, i think the point being made here is this colour change is most likely not intentional

Got it thanks!
After all it was not that hard explaining it on a game forum :)

there is one bit to it

quality of your display matters here A LOT

if you are on an old TN matrix with 7bit FRC you are most likely not seeing anything out of oridinary. same if you set your contrast and brightness to 100% or have a f.. up gamma curve or whatever

i bet some people who see no issue here are in that group

good monitor is not enough - get that thing calibrated (buy or rent an eye, it takes like 15 minutes and makes ENORMOUS difference. or use no-hardware calibration from windows, it is better than nothing)

it is kinda fun to think about - but most and i mean most PC users spend the least effort to pick the item they actually use the most: their monitor.


i never honestly though much of these artifacts, poe is and always has been more of a visual mess than a piece of art to contemplate. but yep, since they have added (and forced) that 'bloom' effect i no longer care about how this game looks. if a game has to use bloom to cover imperfections it no longer cares enough for me to care.
kinda sad to see the same bloom in POE2..

This is now off-topic as my original post has nothing to do with displays.

in theory - yes

in practice - youll get lots of 'i do not see a problem' responses because.. it actually is impossible to see if your display is so bad it cannot tell between two tones

devs understand that, you and me both understand that - but if you want people to understand it as well - well, they have to be able to actually SEE it. and on most cheap-end displays you hardly can tell pale yellow and gray because this part of the palette simply is compressed to one tone.

i did not intend to derail it further, but i presume you are on a good hardware and might have forgotten just HOW BAD monitors can actually be making issue you describe a non-issue for many, many players

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sidtherat#1310 wrote:

in theory - yes

in practice - youll get lots of 'i do not see a problem' responses because.. it actually is impossible to see if your display is so bad it cannot tell between two tones

devs understand that, you and me both understand that - but if you want people to understand it as well - well, they have to be able to actually SEE it. and on most cheap-end displays you hardly can tell pale yellow and gray because this part of the palette simply is compressed to one tone.

i did not intend to derail it further, but i presume you are on a good hardware and might have forgotten just HOW BAD monitors can actually be making issue you describe a non-issue for many, many players

That's actually a good point. However, I'm hoping (and I'm pretty sure) GGG has enough decent monitors to clearly see the issues.

The screenshots I have posted are only the tip of the iceberg, as the issue lies in the lack of a proper transformation from the linear game data to a viewable image. These errors crop up everywhere where there are a bit of harsh light or a strong reflection.

This was really visible in PoE1 (to the point I had to run re-shade to try and minimize that), and my hope was, since I'm going to be playing PoE2, that this will be fixed. It's a big improvement over PoE1, but the problems persist.

Anyway, there's no rush to get it fixed for EA. This can likely be done at any time, when the pressure is off the studio. I just hope to plant a seed and make GGG aware that there's an issue and if they want to improve, there are ways of doing so.

(I'd love to get my hands on a couple of .EXRs from GGG, maybe put a little demo together of what's going on)

(I realized this really should've been posted "Art and sound feedback" subforum, sorry for the bump. Can this be moved?)

really interesting. it never occurred to me as an eyesore or anything, but that's where your background comes in I guess.

The question is: Would GGG prefer the "fixed" look or would this change just be a case of implementing best practice for the sake of it?

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staudd#4625 wrote:

really interesting. it never occurred to me as an eyesore or anything, but that's where your background comes in I guess.

The question is: Would GGG prefer the "fixed" look or would this change just be a case of implementing best practice for the sake of it?

I think GGG AND players would appreciate it more.

1. It's more realistic
2. It does not lose as much detail
3. Fewer weird artifacts (see 'secondary cyan ring in the attached image')
4. It's more "natural" for our brains to understand at a glance

Here's a demo I stole. The black circle indicates a strong white light against a blue surface. The screenshot is divided in two parts - on the left 'standard' view transform (similar to what I can see in the videos and screenshots of PoE2), on the right - something that might be done to improve the situation.



The good news is that it's not that difficult to implement (depends on the engine, of course), but I think any engine that sends images to the display should be able to handle some rather simple color math.