I was flying the other day and noticed a brownish color to clouds, (plenty of posts on this including my own) on a sunny day and got to thinking why does it do this? Why can’t they get the colors correct for clouds and that’s when it dawned on me. Bad pun but really I think I know what to do.
The sun has to have all the colors in the rainbow so to speak and because it’s the “only light source” all the shades of the sun are reflected in the clouds and sometimes with not so good results and I think I know why. In the real world, the sky during the day reflects light back to the ground (blue light) but also to the clouds and I do believe if we add a second light source (blue sky) this should counter the brownish and make it look more gray than brown. 2 light sources the sun and blue sky.
I think the best thing for Asobo to do is to, first, add a very detailed color adjustment tool and, second, add a ‘slider’ control in the menus that controls the intensity of EyeAdaptation.
I’m not even convinced Asobo know what they did to the clouds that made things more yellow and I have to keep in mind the possibility that it wasn’t them that did it. The fact though is that the clouds are currently more yellow than they were from sim release up to either SU5 or SU7. I’m not exactly sure when the color change happened.
What I notice most is that the color of horizon clouds was shifted away from blue to more yellow and red. I also notice that nVidia’s filters have both ‘color temp’ and ‘tint’ and one seems to change the foreground more and the other affects the horizon more (or at least thats how it seems to me) and so maybe it was actually a DirectX change or something and Asobo didn’t directly do it… but that seems less likely than Asobo making changes that they themselves aren’t even aware of – which means it can’t be fixed by them as they can’t understand the complaint.
‘Yellow ashy’ cloud faces is only part of the problem. The sim has always from release had ‘yellow ashy cloud faces’. But it didn’t have as much yellow in the clouds themselves. Look at these two images. the first shows the blue that was and the second shows the more yellow:
I think it was done intentionally to make the ground look warmer but I don’t know and one could also argue that its better but what that extra yellow does to clouds in general - like making many of their shadows more of a charcoal color - is just not good to put it mildly.
Everyone has different eyes and different systems and Asobo seems unaware of their own obvious changes which only leaves me thinking that we need detailed color adjustment tools as its the only true answer I see.
