Adjusting the exposure controls

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to talk about the exposure control area of the rendering dialogue. If you're using Revit LT, you can get to the exposure control settings by going to the visual styles popup on the view control bar, choose online rendering options, and you'll see the adjust exposure button right here. This allows you to change the overall brightness, contrast and exposure values of a rendering either before or after you generate it. So I've already preset the render settings that I'm going to use for this example here in the dialog but let me just run through them. I'm using a setting of medium for the quality, printer resolution and I just clicked in here and typed in 100. That set the pixel dimensions to 1600 by 900. And I'm using an interior sun and artificial lighting scheme so that these lights here on the wall and these pendant lights will contribute to the scene. And then I just chose a sky for the background with a few clouds, but you can choose any of the sky settings if you like. Now I'll click render here and let's just let it process. All right, so when the rendering is complete, you'll see your elapsed time. Mine took about a minute. Your time might vary depending on the hardware that you're using. I had unchecked this box right here so that this dialogue would stay open. And I always like to do that so that I can see how long it took, especially if you walk away from your computer while it's rendering, then that can be nice when you come back to actually know how long the rendering took. Now, the first thing I noticed about this rendering is it's a little washed out. You could see areas over here on the left hand side are getting completely blown out by the sun. So what can we do about that? That's where this adjust exposure setting comes in because this is this really powerful collection of tools here that you can apply either before or after you generate the rendering. So that's what makes this really powerful is you don't have to redo the rendering in order to apply these changes. You can do it interactively right here in the rendering that's already been generated. So let's go ahead and look at some of these values. Now, the first one here is the exposure value. So we're going to start there. Now, before I do anything with it, let me just cancel out of here. And that exposure value is actually tied to the lighting scheme that you're using. So if you use any of the interior schemes, it defaults to nine as you could see a moment ago. If you use any of the exterior settings, notice that it jumps up to 14. Now 14 is on the darker side. Nine is on the brighter side. So the smaller, the number is brighter. The higher, the number is darker. Now, because I changed the scheme, it wants me to rerender. So what I'm going to do is actually set this back to sun and artificial to make that go away and then go back to exposure control. And let me just go ahead and type in 14 and show you what that would do. I'll just click somewhere else to apply it. And then I'll click apply here. So that's pretty dark. Now it's an interesting effect and if you want to try it, you're welcome to, but that's what it would look like if you use that exterior scheme. It would just be significantly darker here in the interior of the space. So I think what we really need, what this rendering calls for is something in-between. 14 is too dark, nine is too bright, but you can adjust this and find a nice happy medium. So I'm going to go down around 10 1/2 and that looks a lot better, right? So notice that it's really not that much darker over here on the right, but it's definitely brought out some of those details over here on the left. They're not quite as washed out anymore. Now you can experiment further and push it a little more into the dark and a little more into the bright, it's up to you, okay. So it's really a matter of personal preference. Now, likewise with highlights and shadows. Highlights will focus on the white areas of the image, the bright areas and shadows will focus only on the dark areas of the image. So for example, we've got a shadow area here behind this box. If I take the highlights and push that brighter and click apply, you're not going to really see much change in the dark areas of the box, but it's going to start to blow out some of those whites. Likewise, if I switch it over to darker and click apply, we'll get some of those details back in the white areas, but we really didn't see again much change here in the box. If you want to see some change in the box, we push that to darker, we click apply. That starts getting a lot darker. Of course, you don't want to focus on just little areas. You want to look at the overall image, but you can see that adjusting the highlights and the shadows starts to allow you to kind of boost and adjust the contrast in different areas of the image. Now, saturation is also an interesting setting. You can see here that to the left it's gray, to the right it's intense. So if we push it all the way to the left and we click apply, it's going to become a gray scale image. We go all the way to the right and we click apply. It's going to become kind of like a cartoon image where it's very posterized and bright primary colors. And we probably want something that's a little bit more in-between. If you go more to the grays, kind of more of the blue gray tones that get favored and you go more to the right, it's more of the yellow orange tones that get favored. The white point, these values are in Kelvin. So light color is measured in Kelvin degrees. And so you can see here, it says cooler and warmer. So once again, if we click that, it becomes a very kind of blue, very cold image. And if we kind of push it this way and we click apply, it becomes a lot warmer and more yellows, browns, that kind of thing. So again, find the setting that suits you. Now, if you want to learn a little bit more about any of these settings, you can click this link here and that will open a web page that will take you to those settings and it will tell you what the range is for each of these settings and what their defaults are. And that can be a little bit helpful when you're making those adjustments. There's some really helpful information down here about the white point that kind of gives you some ideas of what to use. So if you're using incandescent lights, for example, it tells you what the white point should be versus other values. And you could look these values up online, because again, these are in degrees Kelvin. So if you're using LED lights and you want to know what those temperatures should be or tungsten lights or whatever, you can look up those values and type them in appropriately. I do you want to point out that this appears to be a typo. In my experience, the range goes between zero and 21, not -6 and 16, but it's still the same basic range, but otherwise pretty good information in that help file there. So if you're satisfied with all of these settings, you can click okay. If you've messed it up and you're not happy with them, and you wanted to start over, you can click reset. That'll reset all the values back to the defaults, and you can try again. I'm going to click okay. And then like everything else in the render dialogue, these settings become part of this view. So all of these settings will be remembered the next time you render this scene and it will use those exposure values automatically. Now, if you settle on some exposure values that you really like, and you want to use those in other views, then just jot them down somewhere and you can use those as starting points when you're trying to find the optimal values for that other view. So spend a little time experimenting with the exposure control. And I think you'll find that sometimes making just those subtle adjustments in the exposure control can be all that's needed to make a huge difference in the impact of your final rendering.