Very dark Screenshots.
- Thread starter DustyArne
- Start date
mine show up really dark viewing them on the xbox, but when i look at them on my phone or computer they are always a good bit brighter
I use Xbox DVR to send an image to Dropbox. I can then export the Dropbox image to my iPhone. From there I can edit it and generally compensate 2 stops + exposure to deal with the dark images.
I don't know how to share the images to these forums via my iPhone. Can I only do this from my PC?
I don't know how to share the images to these forums via my iPhone. Can I only do this from my PC?
So, here's the rub, there are a few variables at play - back lighting, ambient room lighting, glare etc. This is why in design studios you need to calibrate monitors and what not to take things like that into account. If you have gamma set too high or are using a teev with colour temps / settings etc then its much like music production - you need everything to be at baseline or 'flat' / balanced to know exactly what you are truly seeing. Thus the screenshots you take might be dark, it's just that you had your gamma / tv / contrast set a certain way while you took the shot and it looked artificially bright. If you wanna take the shots as they are, you need to have a flat response from your screen / game settings / consider the effect of ambient or backlighting.
Or you can just edit in Photoshop after the fact but it's usually better to get the best shot you can first. Much like music, sure you can edit or process a bad vocal, but usually it's quicker and more effective to 're track and have the singer 'do it right' (a lot of people vastly over estimate to power of auto tune lol)
Touch wood, I haven't had to edit any of my fave screenshots yet but there have been a few that were a little darker than expected
I'm no expert on this btw, but I do a fair bit of design for print and my mentor taught me to always ensure these things are considered to ensure final print is close to what you see on screen.
*additional - typically my screen shots are looking as I expect so I must be doing something right
Or you can just edit in Photoshop after the fact but it's usually better to get the best shot you can first. Much like music, sure you can edit or process a bad vocal, but usually it's quicker and more effective to 're track and have the singer 'do it right' (a lot of people vastly over estimate to power of auto tune lol)
Touch wood, I haven't had to edit any of my fave screenshots yet but there have been a few that were a little darker than expected
I'm no expert on this btw, but I do a fair bit of design for print and my mentor taught me to always ensure these things are considered to ensure final print is close to what you see on screen.
*additional - typically my screen shots are looking as I expect so I must be doing something right
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So, here's the rub, there are a few variables at play - back lighting, ambient room lighting, glare etc. This is why in design studios you need to calibrate monitors and what not to take things like that into account. If you have gamma set too high or are using a teev with colour temps / settings etc then its much like music production - you need everything to be at baseline or 'flat' / balanced to know exactly what you are truly seeing. Thus the screenshots you take might be dark, it's just that you had your gamma / tv / contrast set a certain way while you took the shot and it looked artificially bright. If you wanna take the shots as they are, you need to have a flat response from your screen / game settings / consider the effect of ambient or backlighting.
Or you can just edit in Photoshop after the fact but it's usually better to get the best shot you can first. Much like music, sure you can edit or process a bad vocal, but usually it's quicker and more effective to 're track and have the singer 'do it right' (a lot of people vastly over estimate to power of auto tune lol)
Touch wood, I haven't had to edit any of my fave screenshots yet but there have been a few that were a little darker than expected
I'm no expert on this btw, but I do a fair bit of design for print and my mentor taught me to always ensure these things are considered to ensure final print is close to what you see on screen.
*additional - typically my screen shots are looking as I expect so I must be doing something right
this crossed my mind, but then i realized i tv is set in " game mode". And with other games, my screenshots look exacly how they look in game.
I think, that the ingame gamma settings are doing this indeed.. But then, i still think its strange the screenshot is much darker then how it looks while i play.
So, here's the rub, there are a few variables at play - back lighting, ambient room lighting, glare etc. This is why in design studios you need to calibrate monitors and what not to take things like that into account. If you have gamma set too high or are using a teev with colour temps / settings etc then its much like music production - you need everything to be at baseline or 'flat' / balanced to know exactly what you are truly seeing. Thus the screenshots you take might be dark, it's just that you had your gamma / tv / contrast set a certain way while you took the shot and it looked artificially bright. If you wanna take the shots as they are, you need to have a flat response from your screen / game settings / consider the effect of ambient or backlighting.
Or you can just edit in Photoshop after the fact but it's usually better to get the best shot you can first. Much like music, sure you can edit or process a bad vocal, but usually it's quicker and more effective to 're track and have the singer 'do it right' (a lot of people vastly over estimate to power of auto tune lol)
Touch wood, I haven't had to edit any of my fave screenshots yet but there have been a few that were a little darker than expected
I'm no expert on this btw, but I do a fair bit of design for print and my mentor taught me to always ensure these things are considered to ensure final print is close to what you see on screen.
*additional - typically my screen shots are looking as I expect so I must be doing something right
All true but, I'm playing on the same monitor I use for my PC this is also the same monitor I use for Photoshop so it's unlikely to be wildly out of calibration even though the Xbox has not been had a custom colour profile created like my PC. I'm a experienced digital photographer LRPS and I can confirm a consistent 2 stop under exposure in the screenshots. This is aparent when I review one after taking the shot in game. There is definitely some other factor at work here and a quick edit in photoshop or similar software is the best fix for now.
Yup - just putting it out there
My screenshots re looking fine, so it's about the only thing I can think of.The other thing is that Game DVR can be ganky.
I still think I have a point, the screen shots that tend to be too dark for me are when I've been playing late at night with the main room light off and just a sidelight for illumination, or sometimes completely in the dark.
Everything can look brighter than it actually is.
Just took a massive batch over the past 2-3 days, and can check across a range of screens / monitors, so will see if any of mine are darker, although there's truth in what I'm saying, I don't really trust Game DVR as a good piece of software
Only other thing I can add is that I've noticed that a few of the pictures I took of capital ships haven't come out right, but I think that's because I didn't' get the shot right in the first place - I usually blame myself first, my tools second but I'm paranoid like that.
**Additional - just checking the latest batch - interestingly, there is one in particular that most certainly looks far too dark, for the most part they look as I expect - I have got *slightly* increased brightness on my Teev, a little bit more contrast so I always expect a mild variation but one in particular is incredibly dark. One other picture looks a little brighter / more washed out than it should.
Something is afoot with those one's for sure.
The only other thing I can think of is compression / how it renders - and I know very little about that so can't really say much, but could the fact that game DVR is probably using some cheap / quick algorithm to compress the files and occasionally this gets it wrong be a factor ?
Something is afoot with those one's for sure.
The only other thing I can think of is compression / how it renders - and I know very little about that so can't really say much, but could the fact that game DVR is probably using some cheap / quick algorithm to compress the files and occasionally this gets it wrong be a factor ?
Im going to compare some screen shots i made while streaming to a laptop. See if it makes any difference.
I also think the DVR on the X1 is not working right sometimes.
Also, could it be that the lighting is rendered server side, so that the XBox doesn't see it while taking a screen shot?
I also think the DVR on the X1 is not working right sometimes.
Also, could it be that the lighting is rendered server side, so that the XBox doesn't see it while taking a screen shot?
I looked at your feed and your recent screenshots seem fine.
Turn up contrast.
Increasing the brightness on the console settings will work, but changing the contrast on the monitor or TV will have no effect on the still image being exported.
You could manually calibrate the output by changing the brightness, gamma, contrast all in settings based on an estimate of what needed changing on the DVR output. Then adjust the monitor back to look visually correct during gameplay. It would take a fair bit of trial and error but would solve the issue.
Yea I ment the in game option. I need to do that when taking pics.
^^^ This is true for me as well. Xbox view for some shots is almost useless, but they look fine on the computer or phone.
Game DVR is a really... bad software. Screenshots are usually darker than live gameplay, I've experienced it in Forza Motorsport 6, too. Video capture quality is awful. As for screenshots, I increased the gamma of Elite so it's a bit better now. I hope that this whole Game DVR nightmare gets a full rewrite on Project Scorpio next year.
Consider how we use laptops and mobile phones.
Mobile phones particularly, used outdoors, lots of glare, typically most people set their phone brightness artificially high (many scenarios tho and sometimes people will use auto-settings which mean it changes). Also phone screens are smaller so the res will look far sharper.
Laptops and computer screens - all depends on make / monitor / screen type but much as lots of Home Hi-Fi's have artifical "true-bass" or different preset EQ settings meaning most people won't listen to music how it was recorded / produced but rather they will listen to it tweaked to their own tastes, meaning engineers usually go for a rich, clear, but relatively flat response which will sound good across a range of possibilities (including room acoustics / system type / context etc). It's the same for screens , TVs and monitors, all of these settings are to artificially enhance what you are seeing but they don't reflect the true media.
I suspect game developers do the same- knowing some people will have different backlight / colour / contrast / brightness / res settings - they probably go for somewhere in-between and set it all a bit flat knowing that many people will fiddle with the settings to their own taste.
But this is the thing - when you do that, you aren't seeing how the game actually looks, and therefore unless you have "flat settings" you never know exactly what you are seeing in terms of what the game is putting out.
I checked my recent screen-shots across 4 different displays yesterday - the pictures all look different, because I have different display / contrast / backlight / settings on all. On my old laptop the pics look really washed out because the brightness is far too high and it has a dell specific preset which I find helpful for certain things, I use this for design / print stuff a lot and it helps me to spot certain nuances but I have to print stuff out and compare on a more balanced screen before I go to print knowing that what I'm looking at is slightly artificial and intended to help me spot things I wouldn't see on a truer screen (if I was working in a design office it would be very different but I work from home on that stuff and don't have the same resources). For music, it's different - I write and edit at home on flat (ish) monitors but the room isn't acoustically treated, so I have to go into the studio into a deadened room with incredibly flat monitors to mix and master. Following that, I go into a bright room with a PA and listen again before I sign off - if it sounds good across that / laptop speakers / phone speakers and then finally hi-fi speakers. I also use EQ to do things end users would typically do like boost the hell outta the bass to ensure it's not going to sound distorted the minute someone puts on their "jazz" or "rock" or "dance" settings on their hi-fi meaning that sometimes I'll dip the sound at certain frequencies and not make them overbearing before the end-user gets their mitts on it.
As I've also said - my screen shots also look different in terms of brightness depending on wether I've taken during the afternoon or at night (when my TV is the brightest thing in the room).
So again - I'm not surprised that with all these sorts of perception and user setting type things going on that there is a variance (I'd be very wary of "game-mode" settings on monitors as that's one manufacturers idea of "game mode" but who is to say that this setting doesn't artificially sharpen or increase contrast / warm up the colours or whatnot (because that's exactly what game mode does on my LG screen so I have it switched off and the settings far more balanced while taking screen-shots).
That said - yup, I've noticed a few that were very, very dark in comparison, so there's even more at play here - dusty may have a point about how light is rendered but I haven't got a clue on that sort of thing I'm afraid but what I can tell you is that compression can and does tend to have an effect on lighting / particle effect type stuff etc which is why if I design a leaflet with a nice smooth gradient fill or a glow , then sometimes going through different compression algorithms can mess this up.
Final thing - for anyone editing / posting from mobile phone - you just can't expect things to look as good on a bigger screen, just ain't gonna happen, mobile phone is the most artificial way of seeing things IMO, I'd look at your images after editing on a computer / screen and once done, you should find your screenshot looks EXCEPTIONAL on a mobile screen, but going the other way is a recipe for disappointment.
Lots of things at play here, I must admit I know more about sound / perception from that level which is why I refer to that (hope it's not confusing) but knowing that hearing and how we see things both have a lot of variables, it's natural for me to try and compare
That said - peeps be getting great screenshots regardless and a little bit of messing with photoshop (or any simple photo-editor really)is all it takes if it's a bit dark (bearing in mind that photoshops algorithms are going to be far nicer than soomething cheap and nasty but for the most part, the layperson won't spot it).
Right, said enough about this - back to some exploring methink, happy screenshot hunting friends
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