Something always bothered me about the colors in Skyrim.
Not so much the landscapes.
The landscapes are *mwah* *mwah* *mwah* so good.
It's pretty much everything else.
Why is everything in the game so dark?
Why are there no bright accented colors anywhere to be seen?
And how can we fix this?
I've said this before.
The environments and the skybox in Skyrim can be bright and lively.
But when it comes to the people, the items and the architecture, everything is a little
dull.
Unsaturated.
There's even some weird contrast issues.
It's as if the gray levels are skewed heavily towards black, and the black levels are bumped
WAY up.
The game looks like it has a weird filter over everything.
Weather this was meant to be cinematic I'm not so sure.
When cinematic color grading is applied to movies it usually makes the image warmer or
cooler.
Color grading is not to be confused with color correction.
Color correction is the process of altering the color of a particular scene to give it
more life.
Color correction is increasingly more important with the rise of digital film.
High end digital cameras produce a flat image that allows for more leeway when color corrected,
making correction a necessity.
You are CORRECTING the color of the image.
Color GRADING is the process of altering the image to give it a stylized look.
Like a tint or a filter.
This could even be applied over the whole project, or multiple scenes.
Color GRADING isn't necessary, but it does look artsy sometimes and it does set the mood
for certain scenes.
But this isn't a movie.
This is SKYRIM.
This is a GAME.
Color correction isn't done in post, because theoretically every asset put into the game
should be perfectly colored to begin with.
Sure there are minor brightness and contrast adjustments you can do, but most of the color
correction is done with lighting effects.
This is why lighting is so important in video games.
Each area has to be lit perfectly so the color looks right no matter where you are.
In my opinion, this is not where things went wrong.
The outdoor lighting is astounding.
Some of the interiors need a little work, but that's not the end of the world.
Everything in Skyrim is dull and brown-ish gray.
Brown is literally the ugliest color I could think of.
It's the color of shit, and burnt garbage.
And I'm not crazy for thinking this.
In 2012 the Australian government funded a research project to find the ugliest color.
They wanted to place this color on tobacco products to discourage people from smoking.
This color is described as "death, dirty and tar."
This color is Pantone 448 C, a drab, dark, gray-ish brown, unfortunately the color of
a lot of things in Skyrim.
So this IS a turn off for people.
It wasn't always supposed to be this way.
The concept art shows some nice vibrant hues.
Typically, a lot of things change between the concept art and the finished product.
I almost always prefer the pure vision of the artist to the final working model, but
these things go through SO MANY iterations and get approved by SO MANY different people,
so things HAVE to change.
I respect that.
It's still fun to compare, I don't know, something like the bright red of the Noble clothes to
the unsaturated bleh-ness of the in game model.
Nothing in the game is THIS red.
The same could be said for the Imperial Armor.
It's highlighted with the same bright red.
The Skyrim artbook notes that "the color red was reserved for the Imperials so players
could clearly see the presence of the Empire in Skyrim."
This is an important distinction that ends up being waaaay more subtle in game.
This is a problem!
The glass armor is probably some of the brightest in the game.
This is due to the turquoise color being so unique in this world.
It catches the eye because it stands out, not because it's ACTUALLY bright.
Look at how bright the yellow is in the concept art.
The same could be said for the Elvish armor.
Remember in the last video how I said it was supposed to be a white gold?
And the Dwemer armor is supposed to look more bronze?
Well, all these yellow, gold, bronze colors end up looking like the same shade.
This is an effect of the weird brown tint of everything.
It's terrible for contrast, and bad for drawing distinctions between the armor sets.
Look at how green the Orc armor was supposed to be.
It's more like a yellow-green.
Instead we got this almost black, brownish green.
Ew.
And look at this.
The character’s supposed to stand out from the background not blend in.
When everything’s the same sort of brown-ish color it all blends together.
Is there any reason why white-gold should blend in with brown rock?
No!
Of course not.
Now, given all these examples you should be pretty convinced that the world of Skyrim
is looking mostly pretty grey, brown, and overall just very dull.
So, what can we do about this?
Given that everything is sort of brown and dull it'd be easy to point the finger at color
grading.
There must be a brown tint over everything, right?
But, when you take the textures out of the game environment, they STILL look dull.
There might be some minor tint from the lighting effects, but thats it.
Fortunately, this is still easily fixable WITH color grading.
Adjusting the levels and applying some heavy color saturation is enough to fix most of
these issues.
It's still not going to help you distinguish the different gold colors of all of the armor
sets.
That's messed up on a whole 'nother level.
But it helps in other cases, like the imperial red finally pops out.
And even though the environments were fine before, it makes them look even BETTER.
Look at how much more lush and vibrant this looks.
It's pretty remarkable what an oversight this color grading issue was.
It's such an easy fix!
If you want to do this yourself, there are a TON of color adjusting mods for Skyrim.
Here I'm using IMAGINATOR which summons a follower who serves as a menu screen for the
color adjustments.
There's even lighting adjustments too.
There are also mods to help fix the textures of the different armor sets, but those will
have to be done individually.
It's much easier to just change the saturation and call it a day.
And if you're on PS4 or Xbox One, unfortunately there's not much you can do because those
mods are garbage.
SO.
What do YOU GUYS think about the problems with Skyrims color?
Do you think that there's an issue or do you think that I'm crazy because EVERYTHING IN SYRIM IS GREAT!
IT'S THE BEST GAME EVER! DON'T SAY ANYTHING BAD ABOUT MY FAVORITE GAME!
That's one of you. That's at least one of you out there.
Leave it in the comments below and if you liked what we did here, don't forget to let
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with it so I can fix it before it goes out to the public.
Well thanks for watching guys.
I'm Bob from the youtube channel WulffDen and if you have any ideas for future shows, why don't you Tweet me
And with that said, I'll see you in the next video. Have a good week!