2 hours ago, Paul K said:

This is all very interesting. What effect does 'film grain' have ? It sounds like something I have no need of.

I enabled film grain for the first time ever and need to verify this next time by disabling it but I'm very pleasantly surprised:  seems to have lost a certain 'frosted' appearance I have complained about for long time.  I notice this in particular in dense evergreen trees and other terrain when there is too much consistently shaded reflections for lack of a better concept, where the light bouncing off of as I say trees in particular is too uniform to be natural.  I've only done two flights so far w/ FG enabled but it's a plus so far on this issue.

4 hours ago, Noel said:

I enabled film grain for the first time ever and need to verify this next time by disabling it but I'm very pleasantly surprised:  seems to have lost a certain 'frosted' appearance I have complained about for long time.  I notice this in particular in dense evergreen trees and other terrain when there is too much consistently shaded reflections for lack of a better concept, where the light bouncing off of as I say trees in particular is too uniform to be natural.  I've only done two flights so far w/ FG enabled but it's a plus so far on this issue.

Thanks for that, Noel. I shall look into it further.

Ansel Adams  wrote a book which I think was Yosemite and the Range of Light. He became famous during a lifetime photographing that park and the National Park Service cooperated with him in building the quaint Adsel Adams retail shop in Yosemite valley.

Adams could see scenes with his eyes that did not look nearly as good when he photographed them. The camera lens does not have the dynamic range that human eyes do. The images in MSFS are images like what a camera lens sees.

Perhaps when building MSFS, Asobo looked at video showing changing interior lighting conditions as planes moved and turned, and made their sim look the same. That video they were watching would have been created by camera lenses, not the human eye. In other words they were not inside planes observing while creating MSFS,  they were watching video of plane interiors while creating their sim.

Adams created a system of developing prints using paper which was had a specific contrast number. Using the system started with pointing a light meter at the darkest area and lightest area of a scene you are now photographing. Based on those numbers, later on that photographer in the darkroom making prints would choose a print paper from one of several boxes of papers, each box having a different contrast number.

The whole idea was to bring back the range of light to the finished image. To make the image look as the eye would see the scene in real life. All the detail in the shadows and all the detail in bright sunlight. 

The MSFS range of light looks like photographic images of Yosemite before Ansel Adams revolutionized landscape photography.

10 hours ago, Noel said:

I enabled film grain for the first time ever and need to verify this next time by disabling it but I'm very pleasantly surprised:  seems to have lost a certain 'frosted' appearance I have complained about for long time.  I notice this in particular in dense evergreen trees and other terrain when there is too much consistently shaded reflections for lack of a better concept, where the light bouncing off of as I say trees in particular is too uniform to be natural.  I've only done two flights so far w/ FG enabled but it's a plus so far on this issue.

Well, I can confirm this on my system.  Trees always had a shimmering frosting along edges, particularly the top.  Film Grain on and this has gone!  I am now back to default settings in the UserCfg.opt file and no Nvidia Freestyle filters and the sim is far better looking, especially the sharpness.

Hopefully someone at Asobo will notice this issue and move to add a slider to give end-user full control over this issue.  I would imagine there is universal desire to be able to do something like this--it's a unnecessary annoyance that appears easy to reduce or eliminate. 

Vote on the issue to dark cockpits here:  https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/instrument-readability-cockpit-too-dark-eye-adaptation/309363

10 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Trees always had a shimmering frosting along edges, particularly the top.

Yep that is an apt description.  And I think you may be right on the sharpness issue as well.

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by Noel

Just turned on sharpening in the .cfg file. Wow! Everything is razor sharp now - the difference is huge. Cockpit, external aircraft textures - even the clouds.. much better. 

Shadows to 4096 also makes a huge difference. 

Got film grain on for now - I'll look out for the trees. The shimmering/frosted appearance has been bothering me for some time. 

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Prior to this I used GeForce experience overlay, tuning settings like highlights and contrast. I'll keep those off for now as I'm very happy with how the sim looks. 

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by Cpt_Piett

 

 

 

 

Needed to turn HDR off for the screenshots. With HDR on it of course looks even better. 

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by Cpt_Piett

I'm going to try setting sharpening to 1.

Meanwhile I sharpen the image by wearing diopter 1.0 reading glasses in front of any device screen. 1.0 does magnify, just a little bit. Makes a big difference.  Try a $5 pair of plastic 1.0 diopters from one of the big online sales sites.