The render output viewed in an image editor (left) looks fine, but after saving to EXR or PNG, the result looks washed out when loaded into VSE (right).
Based on this topic (and similar ones), I’ve tried different combinations of color transform (standard, linear, raw) and alpha (premultiplied, straight), both in the scene and VSE strip settings, but I have been unable to get close to how to render output looks.
I’m rendering in Eevee, Blender 3.3.0
Thanks in advance for your attention and any pointers to a solution.
I suspect the VSE is working in a different Color Space, but don’t really know how you would fix it. I would guess you pick Filmic SRGB in the sequencer… Or turn off Filmic to render and don’t change the sequencer setting.
Sequencer The color space that the Sequencer operates in. By default, the Sequencer operates in sRGB space, but it can also be set to work in Linear space like the Compositing nodes, or another color space. Different color spaces will give different results for color correction, crossfades, and other operations.
Keep in mind that the sequencer works for the most part with rendered images and video files that are already in a specific color space (most likely sRGB), so unless you know that your sources come in a different color space you should leave it at the default.
So why not use filmic for the sequencer? Unless your images are saved as Scene Reffered using a linear scale (like OpenEXR files), it makes no sense to process them using color transforms that expect a much large dynamic range. If you use filmic blender to display an image that is meant to be seen using the sRGB it will look dark and the colors will all be wrong, whites will show as very light gray.
Thanks for that link. It was helpful in clarifying something I only sort of understood from trial and error. My sense is also that the color space difference between the render settings and the VSE strip settings is the cause, but I’ve tried many combinations without getting the saved frame to look like the rendered frame.
For the moment, I’ve set it aside to work on other things. Maybe a break from it will spark some other ideas to try. Meantime, any pointers welcome!
It’s not a color managment issue. Bloom effect is a post processing feature, will only be added in your output if has a background. If your project is a CG integration scene I suggest that you create that effect with a compositing software.
Thanks for that. I turned off eevee’s bloom and this helped: when I load the image into an image editor (middle, below) it does look like the render output (left, below). This is an improvement over before. But when I add it to VSE, I still have the same washed out effect (right, below).
You can see there that I’m using the standard view transform in the render settings, and I’ve tried many combinations of the VSE render settings and strip>source properties. Although these do change the saturation of the resulting image in VSE, no combination that I’ve tried gets even close to the original.
@a59303 Sorry it took a while to back to this. Here it is. I loaded it in a a factory-startup VSE just to see if that would make a difference but it looks the same as every other combination I’ve tried. I’m sure I’m just missing something obvious. Thanks for taking a look at it.
It seams the images did not get packed. You could try just posting one image instead of the entire series. I spent some time on this and unfortunately don’t know what the solution is, maybe someone else with more knowledge will come along. I would also suggest uploading the file that you are rendering from… That might help.
