Render output is brighter that the viewport in compositor window.

Hello! I have one question. When I look at my finished composition in the Image editor, everything looks great. But when I render it out and save it as an, for ex PNG, the whole scene looks way brighter. I know that the PNG format messes with the light intensity, compared to save the image as openEXR. But I do not understand why it gets brighter... Could it be some sort of Ambient Occlusion that mess with the render result? I know its hard for you to know how my setup is like, but I hope that somebody has asked this question before and you have a good answer to this :)

  • Omar Domenech replied

    First thing you can see is if you left some nodes trying to do compositing in the compositor. If you do, maybe you have a brightness contrast node there. You can either delete all your nodes in the compositor or disable "Use Nodes". The second thing you have to take into account is the color management tab. Maybe you fiddled with some of the setting there. See if things are set to filmic or standard. Remember you can reset settings by hoovering over your mouse and with the delete key or backspace on your keyboard things go back to default. 

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  • Adrian Bellworthy replied

    Hey Ulf!
    What exactly did you do in the compositing?
    Can you share a screenshot of the compositing nodes?

    I may be able to see the problem and help with a better solution.

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  • Marc Albrecht(malbrecht) replied

    Even though there is no response from the thread opener, maybe this is of help to others:

    Aside from the helpful hint about the compositor, I just spent way too many hours of my life figuring out that Blender in general does not play nicely with industry-standard color management. So the thread opener might want to check if they have installed OCIO or are using ICC profiles. If so, ONLY exr output will work reliably, everything else in Blender is basically broken. For a pipeline project I am currently working on I had to make sure that Blender was started without any system-wide color management active, there was zero way of getting CORRECT colors otherwise (close and almost-good, but not correct). 

    (for safety measures: you CAN use external color management with Blender! Just don't expect it to work the same - reliable - way it does in Nuke, Houdini, Maya, Clarice, Arnold, Renderman, Redshift or pick-your-pet. It's too much work to get it "close enough", just use Blender in linear space as far as possible or render to exr exclusively.)


    Marc Albrecht

    --- disclaimer: This forum does not inform me about responses. If you want to get a reply to a reply to a reply I wrote, contact me directly please.

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  • Ulf Nilsson(supertuffe) replied

    Hello everybody! So sorry for the late replay. I work as an Illustrator and only uses Blender in may limted spare time, thats why I have been late in my response. Thank you all for your comments!
    The first image is the final render. As for compositing, I do not use any fancy tricks or anything, see the second screenshot. the settings I use for rendering is shown below. And I have forgott the denoise in the final render.... Crap... Now I do realize that I used a glare node and a hue satuartion node in may upload. That could have been the case.
     I realize that the best format is the OpenEXR, but can I use the OpenEXR in an image editor like Affinity or Photoshop? I have to try that when I get home...

    settings_2.pnger_4_postProcess.pngcompositing.pngsettings_1.pngsettings_3.png

  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Hi Ulf, 

    You are using a different Exposure (and Gamma), when saving the Render as PNG:

    Exposure.png

  • Ulf Nilsson(supertuffe) replied

    yepp, it worked to open the OpenEXR files in Photoshop! So it also contains all the values, and I can make final adustments to the image and get good results! Thank you all for your patience and replys!

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