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P3D at night is way too bright

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  • Moderator

A great deal of it has to do with your monitor settings. You could try calibrating your monitor.

 

Vic

 

 

RIG#1 - I9 14900K MSI Pro z790 RTX 5070Ti
40" 4K Monitor 3840x2160 

  • Author
1 minute ago, vgbaron said:

A great deal of it has to do with your monitor settings. You could try calibrating your monitor.

 

Vic

 

And how do i do that?

Exactly what I was gonna say... sounds like your monitor's brightness is set too high...

Don't calibrate your monitor to one sim/game. You'll just screw up everything else, unless you want to change the monitor settings back and forth everytime you use P3D.

There are a couple of major issues that contribute to P3D looking way too bright at night. The first is that the default HDR settings are WAY over exposed for night time. You can combat this by reducing the HDR brightness setting, as well as playing with the night time exposure line in Prepar3D.cfg.

The other factor is sky textures. Some sky textures tend to have an overly bright night time shade which makes things look like perpetual twilight or similar. The only fix there is to try a different set of sky textures. I still use and recommend HDE v2 (FSX version.)

51 minutes ago, molleh said:

Don't calibrate your monitor to one sim/game. You'll just screw up everything else, unless you want to change the monitor settings back and forth everytime you use P3D.

There are a couple of major issues that contribute to P3D looking way too bright at night. The first is that the default HDR settings are WAY over exposed for night time. You can combat this by reducing the HDR brightness setting, as well as playing with the night time exposure line in Prepar3D.cfg.

The other factor is sky textures. Some sky textures tend to have an overly bright night time shade which makes things look like perpetual twilight or similar. The only fix there is to try a different set of sky textures. I still use and recommend HDE v2 (FSX version.)

I agree, and the worst thing you can do is to calibrate a monitor for one application or game. I use Displaymate To calibrate my monitors because I have been using it in my work for years, but there are free programs you can find to check the calibration. Once it is set correctly, you should never have to touch it. 

http://www.calibrize.com/

 

 

 

  • Author
1 hour ago, molleh said:

Don't calibrate your monitor to one sim/game. You'll just screw up everything else, unless you want to change the monitor settings back and forth everytime you use P3D.

There are a couple of major issues that contribute to P3D looking way too bright at night. The first is that the default HDR settings are WAY over exposed for night time. You can combat this by reducing the HDR brightness setting, as well as playing with the night time exposure line in Prepar3D.cfg.

The other factor is sky textures. Some sky textures tend to have an overly bright night time shade which makes things look like perpetual twilight or similar. The only fix there is to try a different set of sky textures. I still use and recommend HDE v2 (FSX version.)

i found some nice sky textures, so now it looks pretty decent, another thing that annoys me is that the stars are visible and are very bright, is there a chance to make the sky even darker? 

21 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

 Once it is set correctly, you should never have to touch it.

 

 That's assuming his monitor is calibrated properly as it is. Vic's idea is the way to start, and adjust the sim from there. 

i7-13700KF, 32gb DDR4 3200,  RTX 4080, Win 11, MSFS 2024

Yes, the monitor needs to be set to reasonable settings to start with. What I was trying to say is don't chase monitor settings trying to get P3D night lighting to look correct.

1 hour ago, Dave_YVR said:

 That's assuming his monitor is calibrated properly as it is. Vic's idea is the way to start, and adjust the sim from there. 

That is why I recommended Displaymate and  posted the link for a free calibrator , so he could check the calibration. You left that part out when you quoted my post. 

 

 

 

  • Commercial Member

Displaymate is terrific software, highly recommend it!

After monitor calibration, you can also adjust the Gamma setting in your graphics card software.  Depending on the monitors you have, you may have to slightly adjust your gamma between day and night flights.

Best wishes.

 

Dave Hodges

 

System Specs:  I9-13900KF, NVIDIA 4070TI, Quest 3, Multiple Displays, Lots of TERRIFIC friends, 3 cats, and a wonderfully stubborn wife.

That your P3D is too bright at night is not necessarily due to the lack of proper monitor calibration. How do I know?  Because even a calibrated monitor displays your screenshots too bright for night time. (And screenshots made via Ctrl+Print are not affected by your monitor settings on the hardware level, unless they are done software-wise via Windows).

I would say that your sky sets are the main culprit. On your screen, you still have the sun setting down on the horizon, while the sky is completely black. This is very unrealistic (unless you are orbiting in space); in the real world, the sky is always blue during a sunset/sunrise at high altitudes. Indeed, the darkness and intensity of the blue is actually less during sunset/sunrise that at noon. I would say that you SHOULD see sunset conditions at the time of your sim, but your ASCA sky set already turns sunset into night as far as sky color, whereas the ground and the clouds are still displaying sunset colors. Personally, I think that some ASCA sky sets are utterly unrealistic. I highly recommend ENVTEX for skies (it is currently on sale).

Here is one example how a sunset sky at 30000 ft should look like (this is with ENVTEX):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxGfZ6paBlRwUy1BSkNkY3drWGs

If you still find your NIGHT too bright, you can reduce the value of "TONEMAP_NIGHT_EXPOSURE_KEY=0.130000" in your p3d.cfg without affecting the daytime brightness. Personally, I have set it to 0.03, and it gives me nice, dark nights.

  • Commercial Member

There can be such a side range be teen monitors / TVs that nobody can really say what someone elses FSX/P3D should look like, especially if the display device isnt the same and hasn't been calibrated.

If you're not presently interested in paying for calibration software there are freeware alternatives which can be easily found via Google. One might be easily suprised at just what a difference it can make.

My very best wishes.

 

 

Dave Hodges

 

System Specs:  I9-13900KF, NVIDIA 4070TI, Quest 3, Multiple Displays, Lots of TERRIFIC friends, 3 cats, and a wonderfully stubborn wife.

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