Ugly time of year in FSX

[Guest jshyluk]

As a quick-and-dirty fix, without having to adjust textures, most modern video cards will allow you to globally adjust tonal effects. So, for instance, you can fiddle with the RGB curves in your video card to either tone down blues/greens overall (and end up with a view like out of the "Matrix" movies), or you can take something that's too drab and pump up one of the hues. It works best if you can gain access to the histograms: graphs that tell you how many pixels are on screen with a particular gamma (the amount of black or white added to a hue in a specific colour channel). Without getting super-technical, the most "natural" looking histograms are those that represent a bell curve. The reason is physiological: the histogram is a bell because that's how the human eye sees stuff. Colour enhancement on a basic level consists of chopping off the 5% or so at each end of the curve. If the curve is skewed off to one side, then there's either too much or too little gamma, at which point, you either re-draw the curve, or you chop off the long end to make a bell shape again. Bloom pushes the bell curve too far to the right. Not by much, but enough to throw off the histogram. Atmospheric perspective would fix that to some extent, I think. The other fix, of course, is to dial down the sun, which can easily be accomplished by not flying at high noon. The FSX histograms do go all over the place sometimes. When I do screenshots for my reviews, I am aften tempted to re-balance the colours. Sometimes I do it, and the results are striking, often beautiful in their realism. But one of the things I promised never to do was to publish altered screenshots in my reviews, unless I make it totally clear that the image was altered by me, and is not original from FSX. Jeff ShylukSenior Staff Reviewer, Avsim