The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism

The #1 best "Blender tip" (that also applies to computer graphics in general), is that by default it is horribly incorrect with its treatment of colour spaces and especially gamma/tonemapping. Rather than me clumsily explaining with text how to get this right and have your artwork "pop" with very little effort, watch this video titled "The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism": ▶ this video Combine that with physically correct materials and rendering, and you could literally "sketch" a handful of grey boxes with a single area light and have it nearly pop out of the screen with uncanny realism! The #2 tip is that chances are that you're probably working with a cheap LCD monitor. Even for $600-$1000 you can get a very decent monitor with DCI-P3 or AdodeRGB wide gamut support and more accurate colour. That helps to produce content that is consistent and correct. That, or invest in a calibrator and set up your operating system colour management with the ICC profile of your panel. Without this, images you grab from Chrome or Firefox will shift in hue and/or brightness when you import them into image editing software. Test your browser with this site: link The #3 tip is that you can make much better colour choices working in a perceptual space. The colour pickers in most software use trivial RGB 0..255 ranges mapped to a rectangle. This is garbage, criminally lazy, clownshoes programming. Yet, everybody does it, resulting in these "curtains of colour" controls: link You shouldn't be seeing those vertical streaks! The transitions should be smooth and even. An excellent space to use for picking colours or creating gradients is Oklab: link Notice how beautiful it looks compared to the other spaces, which are horribly uneven looking? Even just these tips can make someone like me, a non-artist, produce beautiful images, web pages, or 3D models. Art isn't magic, it's a technical skill and you can learn it!

I found this video to visualise what tone mapping is trying to achieve, and why "photorealism" is hard to achieve in computer graphics: ▶ this video And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a much greater dynamic range than a CCD sensor. TIL.

Try poking link Was recommended ▶ this video a little while back, it basically goes 'round in circles a bunch of times describing exactly what you're talking about, then recommends Filmic Blender. I kind of hit my TL;DR point at ~12min. I have no idea if this information is relevant or insightful. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to play around with this stuff one day. (This machine hits 100°C if I try and play *video*... HP thermal design FTW. Not even going to try launching blender, no need to prove it'll melt everything lol)