Light metre.

[Mike1158]

Hi,
I have been thinking about rendering generally and with my total ignorance, forgot to factor in the impact of exposure time to a render. In my old Olympus OM camera's the light meter gives you an idea of how the photograph will turn out via the view through the lense appearing lighter or darker (setting dependent). This gives a reasonable facsimile of the result and allows tailoring of the exposure and apparture settings.

If this could be implemented as a preview it would move folk on a few levels and I think give twilight render an important bonus feature. If I am talking out of my chair, I humbly appologise, just my twenty pence worth.

Mike

[Chris]

Exposure Bracketing? Or something else?

Since you have the ability to adjust exposure during and after render (which you obviously can't with a photo), is that really something that is necessary? Maybe I'm missing the point.

[Mike1158]

For those who are not an expert in the field, the easy to read sign of over/under exposre would save the time to render and then re-render. If you could see right in front of you, whether a particular render needed a bit of adjustment, you could save hours of quite valuable time. Even a professional can do with time saving where possible. This is not me taking the yellow fluid and I am sorry if that is how this comes across. How about a vote?

[Fletch]

Well, you are likely right, that if there were something to tell you automatically, or an 'autoexposure' of sorts, it would be handy.

However, in the meantime, YOU HAVE POWER... get in the habit of saving EVERY rendering you do as .hdr format.
This is a 32 bit format and saves every bit of lighting info you desire. A JPG can be adjusted a bit in Photoshop to compensate for some things, but if you save it severely over or under exposed in .jpg format, some lighting info will not be recoverable in post-pro in an image editor.

by contrast, if you have the over-exposed image saved as an HDR format, and use the Photoshop or other of the many image editors that handle HDR - there are free wonderful ones like Picturnaut (sp?) or others...

then you can change the exposure a million ways to Sunday and never lose data. Don't let HDR scare you, it sounds fancy, but it's just basically that all the lighting info is ALREADY there when Twilight creates the rendering, the lighting info is LOST if you save to an 8bit format. Each format is listed with its bit rate in the User Manual v.1.1

[d12dozr]

These Q&A's are good for us noobs I never knew that about HDR's

Thanks, guys.

[Ecuadorian]

You can also render a tiny image to check everything before rendering the huge one.
Oh, and if you render in a progressive mode (Easy 09 being my favorite), you can freely adjust the exposure after rendering within Twilight without any detrimental effect on the image.