Chromatic abberation (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Wednesday, October 02, 2013, 07:52 (3849 days ago) @ Pyromancy

Why utilize overblowing, blinding, lighting effects?
I don't feel that it draws me in or enhances the realism, just the opposite, I feel like it pushes me away.
HDR ≠ realism

Actually, most of the stuff HDR is used for is somewhat justifiable from the standpoint of realism. Your TV can't represent a very wide range of brightnesses compared to the real world, which makes high-contrast scenes in video games unrealistic to begin with.

For instance, in the real world, your vision is weakly convolved with a roughly gaussian-shaped filter. This means that extremely bright objects in view will have a slight "halo" of light around them. Video games can't represent extremely bright objects at their actual luminances on your TV, so without any use of HDR, you won't experience this realistic effect when playing games. Hence the (admittedly usually quite exaggerated) use of bloom. Is having bloom alongside a non-quite-realistically-bright object more realistic/effective than just letting that object not be very bright? That's debatable. At the very least, it seems to be the case that using that sort of visual cue can make things appear brighter.

Similar arguments can be made for other effects, like the light acclimation that can occur in some games when transitioning between bright areas and dark areas. Actually, this particular effect is sort of required for functional gameplay in environments that want to utilize a broad range of brightnesses.