I think it's not the only value to be set correctly. What about luminascence, saturation,digital vibrance and contrast? setting gamma to 0.45 makes the image uber dark for me.
With our gamma settings now the shadow in the picture is too dark, maybe a bit tweaking with level ,could fix them?
That was admirable, you used our settings to meet our way of see things. Personally i don't mind changing my settings, but we have to agree on the same for everyone for a proper comparison think.
0.45f anf 2.2f are constants to turning linear gamma curve to non linear and back. Math is simple is 1/2.2f=0.45f and 1/0.45=2.2f
in game shaders it looks like this color.rgb = pow (abs(color.rgb), 1/0.45f) < this turns linear to non linear ; or color.rgb = pow (abs(color.rgb), 1/2.2f) < this turns non linear to linear
see this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction
"In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with a gamma of 2.2".
So in video cards driver its 0.45 in other tools its 2.2, some programs and people mess them up and flip values. Many games does not even have slider that allows to reach entire gamma range and witcher 3 is on of such games, where minimal gamma value is not even close to proper one.
It looks dark because you used to linear gamma, but after you will get used to it you will realise that your colors was wrong all the time.
Gamma affects contrast and luminance. everything besides gamma should be default. Different game has different calibrations (or lack of) but you should not change system wide calibrations because of one game since it may have negative impact on others. So just reset nvidia and ati color settings, set 0.45 and get used to it. Some games will ignore it and force linear or its own gamma. in such games you have set 0.45 or 2.2 if they use correct values. or if it is a screwed game like Withcer 3 you should use -4 for gamma value. i others you have to force windowed fullscreen to keep desktop gamma calibration or use reshade \ sweetfx with simple custom function lke this added to custom shader:
#define DisplayGamma 2.2 (or 0.45 in some rare cases)
return pow (abs(color.rgb), DisplayGamma);
But this will not correct broke whites and blacks points. for this you will need something more heavy like my HSV control shader which i have not released yet. Which allows to control value\brightness (but this better to be done after converting gamma to linear, and then back to non linear in 3 stages for best results).
But i found easy way. to restore proper color range in withcer 3:
1) use Reshade framework (not vanilla sweetfx!)
2) Open CustomeFX_settings.cfg
3) Set 1 to USE_REINHARD
4) Set #define ReinhardWhitepoint somewhere in a range of 0.95-0.98 (basically this value could be translated as how much % of maximum brigtness original source had, and it will add like 5% to get 100% range, if you set something like 1.1 it will remove like 10% and will make everything dimmed )
5) Set ReinhardScale 1.0
And after this, you will have colors like this (linear shot, must me watched with gamma 0.45 or will look brighter than it should):
Or like this (this is with non linear 2.2 value, gamma baked into it and on linear you will see it like it supposed to be):
Now lets see histogram:
Tada! We got full whites and black back!
