Normal Map makes my render dark!

Support Lighting and Rendering
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Using Cycles and Principled Shader. I’m using an image texture to connect my normal map (png) to the Normal attribute of the Principled shader

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diffuseONLY.jpg1920×1080 84.5 KB

this is the render with only a Color map

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diffuseandNormal.jpg1920×1080 72 KB

This is what happens when I connect the normal map to the Normal attribute… can anyone explain why everything gets so dark? Nothing else has changed except for me adding the normal map. Thanks in advance

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btw here’s my normal map

Venom_normals_SM.jpg711×711 317 KB

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Here’s my node editor… thank you

nodeEditor.jpg1638×988 312 KB

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You need to string the normal texture through a normal map node first (with the type menu set to ‘tangent space’).

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AHHHHH i seriously just did this after reading blender stack exchange… THANK YOU

I suppose if I were to use a black and white image I wouldn’t need the Normal Map node…

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Might want to use non-color data for the image texture setting.

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If you use b&w you wold use a ‘bump’ node.

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