P3Dv5.3 with EA - how to remove colour cast?

[Ray Proudfoot]

@Daube, luminosity (brightness) and saturation are both configurable with EA on. But they’re quite crude adjustments.

I fly IFR 85% of the time so don’t fly low level much. Today’s flight was just to get a comparative screenshot of my friend’s picture. I may consider it as it does enhance GB scenery significantly.

I’m considering ENVTEX as it integrates with ASCA but it’s the ground colours that are my greatest concern. Hopefully ENVTEX can adjust those.

[dave2013]

I bought RDshade a few months back and it has been one of the best purchases for P3D that I've ever made.

This product allows you to set many different shader parameters.  One of these is the scene tone, where you can adjust the individual intensity of the blue, red, and green color components.  There are many other settings, and a lot of them also work with Enhanced Atmospherics.

Moreover, there are dozens of presets that you can download and try.  I settled on a particular one and then made my own tweaks so I have things looking exactly like I want.

I had ENVSHADE and got rid of it as it didn't do much for EA and didn't make a significant difference IMO.

Dave

 

[Daube]

For the ground colors, if you stay with the default ground textures, it's going to be difficult. I'm pretty sure the default forest texture is nowhere near the England/Wales forests.

I'm not sure what P3D includes by default in its latest versions though... Are these still the same textures as we had in FSX ? Or did they integrate the textures from OrbX Global ? (Or was this only in FlightSimWorld?). Better ground textures might help to get better global rendering/colors anyways. Even better with photoreal of course, even though this is not guaranteed... (I think even OrbX have weird colors on their photo-textures sometimes...)

[dave2013]

I forgot to mention that RDshade also lets you adjust the VC cockpit brightness, which has fixed the issue of dark VCs for me when using EA.

I also made my own preset for night flying where I lowered the cockpit brightness as well as the terrain brightness to make things more realistic at night.

Dave

[okupton]

Not trying to muddy the waters here, but take a look at ENVPlus also.  That was built specifically for p3dv5 and offers more options than rdshade.

one big negative about envplus is there are no presets online that you can download so you have to mess around with envplus more to find the lighting you’re after. 

Both programs are great and can’t go wrong with either in my opinion.

[dave2013]

12 minutes ago, okupton said:

That was built specifically for p3dv5 and offers more options than rdshade.

I had ENVplus as well and wasn't impressed with it.

Some of this stuff is subjective, but I must correct one thing:

ENVplus does not have more options than RDshade.

Dave

[Ray Proudfoot]

Thank you all for your comments. It's difficult to come to a definitive decision as the videos I watched on YT none showed the problem I have and how to correct it.

@dave2013 the RGB adjustment sound useful but if there's isn't a white object in the sim to refer to adjustments would be difficult. With a blueish tint the obvious solution is to lower blue but then green may become the dominant colour. That's why the Spyder tool is so useful as it eliminates human interaction.

Here's a shot of the same area in Snowdonia with EA off. I deleted the shaders so it was a fair comparison. The blueish tint is lessened but still there. I'll chew things over.

[Ray Proudfoot]

1 hour ago, Daube said:

I'm not sure what P3D includes by default in its latest versions though... Are these still the same textures as we had in FSX ? Or did they integrate the textures from OrbX Global ?

LM provided their own textures but after seeing them I decided I still needed FTX Global from ORBX.

Most of the YT Video reviews of ENV products are a few years old. Nothing recent. I also discovered that for EnvShade to work effectively EA needs to be off. There’s no difference that I can see when making adjustments. The cockpit lightening does work.

My gut feeling is RDShade is probably better suited to my requirements. I can’t see anything in EnvTEX to adjust RGB.

The price of €19.95 on their website becomes €26 when directed to SimMarket. So it’s not cheap.

[Bob Scott]

That blueish tint is the result of attempting to replicate the Rayleigh scattering effect in the P3D's shaders, and it surely is way overdone much of the time.  I've concluded that somebody on LM's P3D team must be the descendant of a clan of Smurfs.

I tried and tried with Envshade and even experimented with the shader code myself, and never have been able to mitigate it to my satisfaction.  I'm a bit sceptical that RDShade will do any better, but I'd be a happy camper to find out that it does.  So I'll be interested to see the results of your trial.

[Ray Proudfoot]

@Bob Scott, if you couldn’t resolve the problem I’m not sure I can. There are a few ENV products (why not just one?) so did you try ENVTEX or ENVPLUS?

I’m keen to hear from @kmax59, the author of the ENV series as to whether any of his products can remove the blue cast.

I can live with the lack of really clear skies with the excessive haze but when you have a calibrated monitor that should be showing P3D to its best the blue cast is unacceptable.

[polosim]

27 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

lack of really clear skies with the excessive haze

Hi Ray, I'm curious about this, which leads me to ask what settings you use to:

WEATHER: Rate at which weather change over time.

I think that could be the cause of the lack of your clear skies and excessive haze.

P.s: Image is for purposes of location of the aforementioned setting.

 

Edited February 29, 2024 by polosim

[Ray Proudfoot]

@polosim, weather is injected from ASP3D and ASCA every 15 minutes. I have adjusted max visibility setting in ASP3D to 100nm in an attempt to improve it. It was previously set to 50-75 or less.

A search for Rayleigh and P3D found this discussion on LM site. This is a very clever chap who has made some useful discoveries.

https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=144145&hilit=Rayleigh

Trying to correct the ground colours is probably the wrong idea. It’s the effect of the Rayleigh atmospheric effect that’s the problem as Bob alluded to. I’ll have a read through the above topic and see if it reveals anything useful.

[polosim]

34 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

weather is injected from ASP3D and ASCA every 15 minutes.

Sorry for the insistence, just out of curiosity, I would like to know what setting you use in that specific option.

[Ray Proudfoot]

2 minutes ago, polosim said:

Sorry for the insistence, just out of curiosity, I would like to know what setting you use in that specific option.

I’ll post a screenshot tomorrow.

[dave2013]

Ray, does your first screenshot have cloud cover?  If those are clear skies, and it's not very early or late in the day, then your scenery looks too dark.  I don't see the overly bluish tint.

BTW, the atmospheric scattering effect does indeed result in a slightly bluish tint to the atmosphere, so this might actually be more realistic.

There's a guy who made a preset for RDshade where the bluish tint is actually increased a bit over the stock setting, as well as a number of other tweaks like brightening everything up a bit.  He claims that his settings are based on his real life experience as a commercial pilot and that this is the best we can have with P3Dv5 and EA. He also increases the sim HDR brightness to 1.25.

I took his settings and slightly adjusted some of them and must say the sim looks more realistic than ever.

Dave