One thing i noted in a lot of X-Plane 10 screenshots is the lack of contrast in the textures. Very often the scenery looks a bit dull. Since I am currently unable to run X-Plane 10 at all and I don't have my new computer just yet I decided to play a little with the screenshots that alpilotx posted in his "X-Plane 10, Landscapes of the world" thread (http://forum.avsim.n...125-screenshots). I tried to add just a little bit of contrast to them and in my personal opinion this subtle change makes quite a bit of a difference. Even though in reality from the air the scenery might not be as colorful and contrasty as the edited pics to me they look much more real. Might be my personal perception though.Since alpilotx kindly granted me to post the edited shots in here I'll give you a few examples of what I mean:I wonder if it might be possible to create some sort of texture-mod by just adding contrast to the default textures.

Now that looks great. Things appear very lush and full of life. Does anyone know if the sim could be tweaked to display a similar effect?

Increase the contrast on your monitor and you'll be all set.

I don't know about ATI, but it's possible to set up a color and contrast profile in the NVIDIA control panel to give the same effects.

The real secret is gamma. Most people run it at 2.5 and above, which is way too high. Everything washes out and seems unrealistic.Try it below 2. You can adjust your screen contrast to your liking. Things blend together better.I have a few vids that basically are all below gamma 2. They are not perfect, but they convey a sense of place.http://youtu.be/uBs2NSMXTwM

I'm not sure if just increasing display contrast would be the best solution because you will end up increasing contrast for the entire image (as in the shots above) which will lead to blown out highlights in the clouds and shadows that are too dark. I guess the best option really might be to edit the textures themselves.

I dabble in photography, and use the same trick (either raising the black cutoff or increasing the overall contrast) to remove the effect of haze on landscape photos. Which is exactly what you are doing in many of these shots.Then again, I always felt the haze was a bit overdone in XP9.-james

Beautiful shots,It does make a huge difference.

Colors tend to be muted in real-life, so I think the unedited shots looks more realistic.

The daylight lighting has always been a problem in Windows based X-plane. It always looks like it's cloudy or about to rain - may make sense for Seattle and most of England perhaps but not in most of US and other places aound the world.The gamma adjustment solution is not adequate, imho.

I must say, that I don't like the edited shots so much (don't worry, I do in no way want to say, that you must remove them ). I am out in the mountains quite often (the Alps that is), and have to say, that they don't look like in your shots ... or only very very rarely look like that. Haze IS an important part of the landscape, and its not very common, that it looks so full of contrast (yes, sometimes it happens, but its not the norm). Just look up some un-edited pictures on airliners.net (or wherever you like). You will notice, that most of the time, there is quite some haze in them ...AND, then there is another factor. And its much, much more important than many realize. Depending on the color management of you OS + the monitor (and the myriads of settings it provides), there can be extremely different end results on screen! I just realized this myself, when last weekend I hooked up X-plane to my 42" flat screen (via HDMI) .... and it had quite different colors than my "normal" TFT (I have seen the result in sync, as I used cloned TwinView).So, it can easily happen, that the same observer would like the edited shots on one screen, and the unedited ones on another screen. Accurate color representation is almost impossible (without buying high quality displays, color calibration devices and using OS-es with reliable color profiling).