PC screen "washed out" in rendering

Question

I have a model of an iMac here. I put a screenshot of our geriatric care software on it. Unfortunately, the render result looks very "washed out". Little colors and little contrast. It feels like I've tried all the settings, but I can't get any better results. It seems to be due to the "scene environment". Could someone put me on the right horse here?

Original screenshot:

Rendered screenshot:

Blender-File: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsGWzsxwWW8RkRkA7Js1WZg_Xbzu?e=yumPkg

Many Thanks! George

Hello :). What exactly have you tried to solve this. And how did you add the image - using a shader? Real screens are backlit, what about this one? — jachym michal, Jun 23 '21 at 09:00
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58272/making-an-emission-shader-emit-a-different-colour-of-light-than-the-colour-assig/58280#58280 — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, Jun 23 '21 at 09:26
Oh, and 5. since a monitor display is usually dark when it's not displaying an image, it would be best to plug the image only into the Emission input, and leave the Base Color a medium or dark gray. — Gordon Brinkmann, Jun 23 '21 at 09:58
Thank you for the complete review. As you see: We ware complete 3D-noobs, doing first steps in an unknown area ;-) We will completely rethink our scene setup when the opportunity arises, but since we have already finished some scenes, we currently cannot change "global" parameters. Currently the image is placed via a shader and the screen has no backlit. But I don't understand why the "headline" of the rendered screenshot is really black, but the "body text" is muddy gray. In the original screenshot, the body text has the same black as the header. — Georg Hermann, Jun 23 '21 at 13:36
I can only guess that this has to do with anti-aliasing etc., you see there is a large black space in the header with not much "side effect" from the surrounding white, whereas the text is made of thinner lines where the influence of the surrounding white has much more effect. When images are anti-aliased and there's e.g. a 1 pixel black line on a white background, than white and black get mixed at the threshold to gray. If the line is 50 pixels wide and the outer 1 pixel border is gray, then the inner 48 pixel line is still black thus making this line appear black, and the thin line gray. — Gordon Brinkmann, Jun 23 '21 at 14:29

Chris · Accepted Answer · 2021-06-23T14:05:18.520

2

you could add a hue/saturation node, then you get this:

or with saturation 10:

UPDATE

as troy_s wrote here (How do you make an image emission without washing out the image?) you can change your shader like this:

and color management like this:

and then you will get:

and here another result with slightly different values:

edited Jun 23 '21 at 14:05

answered Jun 23 '21 at 09:04

Chris

59,454
6
30
84

To get it more realistic it would help to first of all make the screen emissive. – Gordon Brinkmann Jun 23 '21 at 09:56
@GordonBrinkmann : you are Right, but he asked for the „washed out“ problem, not for realistic – Chris Jun 23 '21 at 09:59
Well, if you want to be nit-picky and just care for what he actually wrote... he was guessing it has to do with "scene environment". So before I change saturation etc. which changes the actual colors of the image, I would reduce the overall brightness in the scene and set View Type to Standard instead of Filmic... maybe even set the Specular in the Principled BSDF to 0 et voilà, it looks a lot better than before ;) – Gordon Brinkmann Jun 23 '21 at 10:09
@GordonBrinkmann : you are free to write a much better answer than I did…just do it. – Chris Jun 23 '21 at 10:13
1

Thank you very much for your answer. Its getting better... But I don't understand why the "headline" of the rendered screenshot is really black, but the "body text" is muddy gray. In the original screenshot, the body text has the same black as the header. – Georg Hermann Jun 23 '21 at 13:41
i updated my answer for another solution - which Duarte linked – Chris Jun 23 '21 at 14:05
@Chris : Nice, THX! With that settings the screen is pefect, but the rest of the scene far to dark. I think the complete setup of the scene has to be reworked... somehow. – Georg Hermann Jun 23 '21 at 14:52
You could increase your light strength … – Chris Jun 23 '21 at 14:55

PC screen "washed out" in rendering

1 Answers1