Friday Facts #320 - Color correction

[Tynach]

And i think you overestimate the average humans interest in caring for all that which you said about color calibration.
Furthermore, i did say average here. Meaning Wube should strive for the middle ground that makes everyone happy, not just the ones with monochrome monitors from the 60's or those who spent waaaaay too much effort looking up which monitor is "elite" enough to qualify for the visualphile hipsters.

The gist of my argument here, is that it's only important for the developers and art direction decision makers to use a color calibrated monitor, and even then only when figuring out how it'll look on average for people with general, consumer grade hardware. A known, standardized calibration acts as a baseline, for use by people who make these decisions for a living.

I don't recommend everyone go out and buy color calibrated monitors, or calibration equipment. That'd be absurd. But it's also absurd to expect the developers to know how it'll look on your setup. If your monitor is so far off from the baseline standard that the changes they made look cartoony or overly bright compared to the old, that's not their fault.

On ordinary, every-day consumer hardware, the difference between the before and after is extremely small. If it looks so vastly different that you're vehemently against it so much, there's something going on with your display. So far, 3 people now have mentioned fixing their monitor settings and deciding the new colors aren't so bad after all. I didn't really expect anyone to do so, but it's neat that they did.

Ah yes here we go. "If you don't like it then mod it"
So if an overwhelming majority of players who don't like the childish colors have to run mods to enjoy the game, that's all good because the underwhelming minority has such an interest in color calibrated monitors that everything looks dark and gloomy to them unless the brightness and saturation is turned all the way up to 11?

Cool, let's assume Wube removes belts from the game and replaces them with logistic robots all the way through the game... Let's imagine you like belts...
"That's what mods are for! If you want belts you can add them with mods dude"

I highly doubt it's a majority of players. I'm betting the vast majority of people had no problems with the changes, and just read the FFF post and moved on with their lives - blissfully unaware of how many people were complaining about it on the forums.

I would have done the same (as I do with all prior FFF news posts), except that color correction algorithms is almost literally all I've done for a few years now, for fun. So I felt obligated to make some posts on the topic and interact a bit with the community.

Note: I completely understand I am in a minority, by a long shot. Heck, I came here initially because I had a bit of an issue with them going with LUTs for the day/night cycle, but after hearing the benefits for it being more moddable and easier for artists to get working, I backed down on that. Why? Because that's absolutely true, and I had to be reminded that my nerdiness of wanting to express complex lighting changes with a grid of 9 numbers is an extremely niche interest that nobody else cares about (and rightly so). Besides, I can bake those calculations into a LUT and still get my color nerd fix.

I was completely and utterly wrong in that original position I had. And that's OK.

You are killing your own argument here. Mods exist for the FEW that want something more or different with the game. If a MAJORITY doesn't like the way the game plays then you have a problem with the game. In this case i'd say a majority is going to have problems with the color changes while the visualphiles who think it's all about pixels and nothing at all about personal taste will drown any such discussion with technical details.
And besides that, mods exist to allow the community to be creative with the game engine. They don't exist to make a game playable for the majority of players.

Again, I think you're overestimating how many people are actually complaining, when compared to how many people just are not saying anything because they have no complaints.

That said, overall I agree with the basic point you're making - and I have used the exact same argument against the Gnome desktop environment. When you need extensions/mods for basic and fundamental functionality, there is a problem. However, I don't believe this to be one of those cases.

So negative feedback is insulting to you then? Great! Maybe you should become a game developer and at the first mention that you've made a bad choice you can call them insulting and ignore them and keep making a game with glaring flaws that will turn most of your customers at the door.

From my own experience though, Wube at least knows how to listen to negative feedback and not get all touchy feely about it. And in fact change their minds about something controversial from time to time.
The only ones who can't take negative feedback are those living in a bubble thinking everything they do is perfect.

I would like to get into game dev, yeah. Extremely competitive field though, and I need a job that pays as soon as possible so I can move out. Indie game dev won't do that for me unless I can magically overcome my ADHD-PI, and professional game dev for large companies is a bit of a shit show right now.

I just want a regular dev job so I can get my own place and save up some money, be able to afford medical insurance, and maybe - just maybe - I'll then be able to spend time making a game.

As much as you want this to be some kind of dictatorship where you get to tell people what to think and say, i am sorry to say that you have no such control here or anywhere else for that matter.
I have every right in the world to provide feedback, especially when they ASKED for it in the first place.
And even if they didn't ask for it i would give it when i feel they are doing something bad. Without unfiltered feedback you have what amounts to an echo chamber.

Even if you push out the nastiest sulfur turd of a game, in an echo chamber, you would be praised for it because everyone is so damn PC that they don't dare tell the truth. I am not that kind of person and that's called freedom.
Even if you take my life, you cannot take my freedom so how about you stop trying kk?

I just don't think it's called for to first say that different players have different tastes, and then singling out the developers' own tastes and specifically calling them in particular bad. That's just rude, especially since you combined your post with a triad against calibration standards that are specifically designed to help developers and designers make judgements like this.

You're basically saying, "It looks bad on MY system, which is more important than MOST systems, and that makes the developers' tastes bad!" And that's what I have a problem with.

I KNOW







Feel free to throw a fit over how bad it is, i would like to hear about it so i can take in what you have to say and depending on your choice of words i might actually become better at it.
Or would you rather hear "You have no right to give my negative feedback... negative feedback. My feels might be hurt! I am calling the cyberbully police!"

EDIT: Forgot my second take on an iron pipe.

Well, I will say this: those are way better than what I would have probably wound up with! Perhaps they're sliightly too shiny for my tastes, but that's just needless nitpicking (and doesn't apply to the first one, nor the white one; both of those look excellent to me).

Maybe I could also nitpick the lighting, as it looks more like indoor lighting than outdoor lighting... But at the zoom levels I'd likely be seeing them at most of the time? If anything, they'd fit in with the 'slightly overcast' look that the game currently has. So that's still not a point against them, just making a note about the stylistic choices you made.

Very nice work

[Cadde]

If your monitor is so far off from the baseline standard that the changes they made look cartoony or overly bright compared to the old, that's not their fault.

And there you go again, blaming the hardware for something that most definitely is a matter of personal taste.
I've looked at the comparisons on several different screens already and my conclusion is the same. The before looks better than the after.

You simply cannot accept that regardless of what screen one is looking at, personal taste is king. The new composition just doesn't sit well with me. They are too bright and colorful, simple as that. It is in bad taste to change something that is supposed to be reflecting a factory into something that resembles a fresh bouncy castle.

On ordinary, every-day consumer hardware, the difference between the before and after is extremely small.

Again with the hardware... No! To YOU the difference is small, to YOUR eyes the change is better. YOU like the change.
If i was sitting at a perfectly 101% calibrated monitor and spent a trillion dollars getting that calibration just right... And i played the game for thousands of hours before the change and didn't really complain about it. Then they change it to THAT and i start complaining... Is it my hardwares fault then?
Or could it just possibly be such that I don't like the change they made? I don't like the shiny glaring colors they added to it? The change is massive to me and if i had to play with it i simply wouldn't. So if they push this change on me i will have to play with a restoration mod forever and thus not be able to play with friends who don't run mods.

OOOO that's great isn't it? "You don't like it, just mod it"
What if my friends don't like the change either but they are still hard against running mods? Because people are like that. They are hard set on NOT playing with mods for one reason or another. And they still don't like the colors.
I actually linked them the comparison and they said it looked horrible too.

If it looks so vastly different that you're vehemently against it so much, there's something going on with your display.

Yep and that's why i almost hate you hipsters with your "you have the wrong hardware" arguments. It's like listening to you arguing over gold plated Toslink and how it makes your audio so much better. "It's gold, the most conductive material known to man so clearly it's better"
There is nothing going on with my display, i even checked the "lagom" pages to see if there was some truth to what you were saying and no, both my displays passed those "tests" with flying colors. Pun intended.

So far, 3 people now have mentioned fixing their monitor settings and deciding the new colors aren't so bad after all. I didn't really expect anyone to do so, but it's neat that they did.

And more than three people have been convinced the earth is a pancake. Maybe they changed their monitors to the worse? Now everything BUT the new and playful Factorio looks dark and gloomy to them?
What came first? The chicken or the egg? I can change my monitor setup so the new graphics doesn't stab me in the eye too but then literally everything else i run will look like gray goo.

You're basically saying, "It looks bad on MY system, which is more important than MOST systems, and that makes the developers' tastes bad!" And that's what I have a problem with.

At what point did i say that? I get the feeling you are interpreting what i said completely wrong here because i said "average" and with average i am talking about the average player and his setup. Average is the sum of all contributors divided by the number of contributors.
If you have 25% saying the game is too dark, another 25% saying it's too bright and the remaining 50% thinks it's just fine then you have a very balanced (average) composition that doesn't skew the balance.

... But yes, let's play your silly game. "It looks good on your system so everybody is going to dance to your barrel now"

Well, I will say this: those are way better than what I would have probably wound up with! Perhaps they're sliightly too shiny for my tastes, but that's just needless nitpicking (and doesn't apply to the first one, nor the white one; both of those look excellent to me).

Maybe I could also nitpick the lighting, as it looks more like indoor lighting than outdoor lighting... But at the zoom levels I'd likely be seeing them at most of the time? If anything, they'd fit in with the 'slightly overcast' look that the game currently has. So that's still not a point against them, just making a note about the stylistic choices you made.

Very nice work

Yes, they are too shiny. It's really difficult to find a good balance with that because those pipes were specifically made for playing with mods that themselves were a bit shiny already.
And yes, i didn't use any environment setup to give them a more global illumination because doing that would make them look washed out and that's something i didn't want. I am sure i could have found just the right lighting setup to where they stayed crisp and not so shiny but i had been playing with the lighting setup for a few hours already. The thing about lighting is it must stay consistent across the board and work with every material (reflective or matte) equally.
Changing the lighting for one setup means changing it for all setups and then adjusting each and every one AGAIN so they look right.

Such things aren't as much of a problem in 3D games with actual shaders. But it is a problem when you have to "build" your renders every time you change something small. And then you have to contend with the fact everything is a sprite. That is, you can't make it look good at all zoom levels without handcrafting them a bit. I didn't go that far.

[Tynach]

Spot on... the monitor had shifted to game profile with a weird transfer function increasing hue. Back to calibrated sRGB profile, and it looks actually plausible.

Ah, I forgot many monitors had those things... My current ones don't, but I've had plenty of past monitors that had modes which did all sorts of weird stuff, like change the brightness and contrast automatically depending on how bright or dark the picture was (often causing it to be impossible to see things, and of course completely messing up how whatever I was watching/looking at was meant to be seen).

I will say that often a dedicated 'sRGB' mode will desaturate colors more than necessary, and it's worth trying a 'standard' or 'factory settings' mode first. Those are often good compromises between accuracy and using the full range of colors the monitor can produce. It probably won't be "as accurate" as the 'sRGB' mode, but.. I don't have much faith in factory sRGB mode calibrations to begin with x)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wow! The last time I checked the FFF on color corrections I realized that my preference depended on viewing angle onto my monitor. Weird enough. Now I went through the Lagom LCD Test Images to check my monitor settings, adjusted so that it is "correct". Checked the FFF on color correction again. Now I prefer the new colors*. I had just no idea how badly my monitor was set up. I really only changed the settings of my monitor. No external measurement device.

Usually that's all that's ever needed! The only time an actual colorimeter needs to be involved, is if you want to match two different monitors to each other so that an image is reproducible on both displays in exactly the same manner. This is important, for example, when simulating how something will look on a lower-end monitor, or when printed out on paper.

In my case, I just really wanted to test my color conversion code, and having an image look identical on two completely different displays is basically a curiosity I've had since I was a kid and noticed displays showing things all weird compared to other displays. I don't think I really "got my money's worth" out of it, though at least I managed to get it on sale.

Basically, it hurt to buy and I certainly don't recommend the average user buying one. Test images like the ones on those pages are more than enough for most uses anyway

Not only the new colors for Factorio as presented in the FFF, but also other things look just better now. I am very grateful for this hint, and super happy that everything is better now.

Thanks, Tynach!

Hey, you're the one who figured out how to configure your monitor - I just linked to some test images I know to be good, and threw a bunch of 'what to maybe check into' idea-darts into a field while blindfolded, hoping one of them hits somewhere relatively near a theoretical target that hopefully exists. And hoping I don't accidentally hit someone.

*The heavy blue tones by night are very atmospheric (All cats are grey by night!) but will get some getting used to.

This is an interesting topic to discuss, at least to me... But mostly because I don't actually know how it'll turn out. And I am terrible at judging what looks good or bad, and haven't even really given an opinion on the changes themselves - because I don't have opinions on them. I have opinions on the way they're implemented on a technical level, but I already know my original position on that front was total bunk anyway.

See, the white point they seem to be using for the new night mode? Waayy too blue. But I didn't even realize that until someone else pointed it out! I was like, "What? No, it's fine!" And I started modifying my color temperature adjustment code to compare against what the official CIE standard is for the most bluish sky possible (with a correlated color temperature of 25000K; code defaults to ending at 9000K, but that's changeable on line 409).

The result? They're totally right. The new night mode's white point is definitely more blue than it ever should be.

So I pondered writing a post just about that, but while I thought about it, I also realized that maybe they did that on purpose. After all, our brains will adapt the white point if it's our main point of reference, so if the game is in fullscreen mode, using a realistic white point might just get adjusted by our brains to look like normal white. So, perhaps they purposefully are compensating for that by making it too blue in a strictly technical sense, but when it's the only thing on the screen our brains turn it into just blue enough to still see it as 'tinted blue'.

Besides, this is an alien planet. Maybe the atmosphere scatters light in a way that makes night time really blue for some reason?

It's one of those things that I have no idea what I'd say regarding if it 'looks good'. My only possible problem with it is that it doesn't strictly follow the formula for the CIE's D series of illuminant standards, but then again this is for night time... And the D series is for illuminants acting as Daylight simulators. So my only possible complaint is invalid from the start.

Just as the reduced contrast on the stone path sprites. But these are my only complaints after adjusting my monitor settings.

I hadn't even noticed that until I found your other post mentioning it (yeah I sifted through your posts on here, but I swear I'm not a stalker normally; I was just wondering if I had responded to you before, or if you'd responded to me in the past in here, and what the context of that was if either of those happened). I actually think it might be related to one of the things mentioned in my brief back-and-forth with Posila:

You a have a good point with blending in sRGB vs. linear RGB. In general, working with sRGB as if it was linear color space does not create much issues (there are some - for example lot of smoke sprites overlapping makes the smoke darker around borders than its in the center), but I have not considered it might cause much more severe errors when doing color grading with LUTs. It's worth looking into.

The stone sprites are right in that transition area, and that very well might be why their contrast is getting reduced. If that's the case, then the devs know and can probably fix it

[Tynach]

And there you go again, blaming the hardware for something that most definitely is a matter of personal taste.
I've looked at the comparisons on several different screens already and my conclusion is the same. The before looks better than the after.

You simply cannot accept that regardless of what screen one is looking at, personal taste is king. The new composition just doesn't sit well with me. They are too bright and colorful, simple as that. It is in bad taste to change something that is supposed to be reflecting a factory into something that resembles a fresh bouncy castle.

The personal tastes of the developers are more important than the personal tastes of a minority of players.

Again with the hardware... No! To YOU the difference is small, to YOUR eyes the change is better. YOU like the change.
If i was sitting at a perfectly 101% calibrated monitor and spent a trillion dollars getting that calibration just right... And i played the game for thousands of hours before the change and didn't really complain about it. Then they change it to THAT and i start complaining... Is it my hardwares fault then?
Or could it just possibly be such that I don't like the change they made? I don't like the shiny glaring colors they added to it? The change is massive to me and if i had to play with it i simply wouldn't. So if they push this change on me i will have to play with a restoration mod forever and thus not be able to play with friends who don't run mods.

I never said I liked the change or didn't like the change. I absolutely suck at telling whether something looks better or worse than something else, so all of my arguments have been purely technical in nature - that is, with the exception of having to argue against unnecessary insults thrown at the developers.

Also, you might have noticed that I have never recommended for anyone to buy a factory-calibrated monitor. I mentioned having one myself, and a colorimeter - but that's because I'm an insane nerd who does overly nerdy things very nerdily. While the colorimeter has been very handy a few times, I still am not sure if I regret buying it or not due to how much it cost.

OOOO that's great isn't it? "You don't like it, just mod it"
What if my friends don't like the change either but they are still hard against running mods? Because people are like that. They are hard set on NOT playing with mods for one reason or another. And they still don't like the colors.
I actually linked them the comparison and they said it looked horrible too.

Hah, I'm actually the same way, because I like playing games "how they're intended to be" first before I try out mods. That's also part of why I am defending the color changes - if the developers feel like the new colors better reflect how they want the game to be played, then those are the colors I will want to have when I play.

Yep and that's why i almost hate you hipsters with your "you have the wrong hardware" arguments. It's like listening to you arguing over gold plated Toslink and how it makes your audio so much better. "It's gold, the most conductive material known to man so clearly it's better"
There is nothing going on with my display, i even checked the "lagom" pages to see if there was some truth to what you were saying and no, both my displays passed those "tests" with flying colors. Pun intended.

That's totally fair It could still be that your monitors have a higher gamut than the sRGB standard; perhaps they target either the DCI-P3 or AdobeRGB standard. Sadly, there's no test image for seeing if that's the case or not.

And more than three people have been convinced the earth is a pancake. Maybe they changed their monitors to the worse? Now everything BUT the new and playful Factorio looks dark and gloomy to them?
What came first? The chicken or the egg? I can change my monitor setup so the new graphics doesn't stab me in the eye too but then literally everything else i run will look like gray goo.

One person claims otherwise, but I will admit that's a worry of mine. A lot of people have their displays set up how they prefer, and while I admit I feel good about helping people improve their setup, I also worry that they had it set up like that for a reason at one point - and when they get back to that thing that caused them to change their setup, it's all completely messed up for them now.

This is a legitimate possibility, and it's worth saying that anyone who does adjust their monitors might want to also look at a variety of content they're used to seeing on their display, and make sure all of it still looks good to them.

At what point did i say that? I get the feeling you are interpreting what i said completely wrong here because i said "average" and with average i am talking about the average player and his setup. Average is the sum of all contributors divided by the number of contributors.
If you have 25% saying the game is too dark, another 25% saying it's too bright and the remaining 50% thinks it's just fine then you have a very balanced (average) composition that doesn't skew the balance.

... But yes, let's play your silly game. "It looks good on your system so everybody is going to dance to your barrel now"

Ah, I thought you were talking about the average of how other games looked on your setup, and to me that's sorta irrelevant. Every game has a different style, and different artists (unless they're made by the same people), and thus to me shouldn't be compared so broadly. I very well might be misunderstanding you, and for that I apologize.

Yes, they are too shiny. It's really difficult to find a good balance with that because those pipes were specifically made for playing with mods that themselves were a bit shiny already.
And yes, i didn't use any environment setup to give them a more global illumination because doing that would make them look washed out and that's something i didn't want. I am sure i could have found just the right lighting setup to where they stayed crisp and not so shiny but i had been playing with the lighting setup for a few hours already. The thing about lighting is it must stay consistent across the board and work with every material (reflective or matte) equally.
Changing the lighting for one setup means changing it for all setups and then adjusting each and every one AGAIN so they look right.

Such things aren't as much of a problem in 3D games with actual shaders. But it is a problem when you have to "build" your renders every time you change something small. And then you have to contend with the fact everything is a sprite. That is, you can't make it look good at all zoom levels without handcrafting them a bit. I didn't go that far.

I 1000% agree with everything here, very well said.

I think for a lighting setup, I'd have just used one 'sun' lamp, and made the background dim enough that the shadows from the single sun lamp would be dark on the surface of the pipe. But I'm slowly realizing that such an approach might not give good results in this case (especially for the copper pipe), so.. Yeah. I'm no artist, and I should not make artistic judgments.

[BartZeroSix]

Most people I know are playing more "classic" games like Minecraft/Simcity... And they really like the idea of Factorio, but just would never play it because of how it looks: a dull, monochrome, bad looking game. Which it is really. This is my favorite game, gameplay wise. But it's just sad to look at.

Those color changes are really great, IMO BY FAR the best change since I started playing in 0.15), and even "cleaner" textures (no rust and such) would be a great addition/option.

Lets be real, this game make you feel like you are just literally destroying eveything around you. And a bunch of people would like to have the option not to: peaceful bitters/no pollution are options, but you still keep the "filthy factory" look of factorio.

And to all the "real gamers" that dont want a "rainbow factory", you are getting really ridiculous again. Just compare the new look to any other "highly saturated" game and you'll instantly see that factorio would still be pretty dull even with those changes. Also multiple people have said that it was looking good now that they had fixed their monitor settings, so consider that before saying that Albert work is bad on that FFF. Also, tastes. (And I'm sure the average/casual player will prefer new colors btw.)

That's my 2 cents, in my case I would by 3 more copies (wife/daughter/daughter) of the game instantly if there was a "clean looking" game option
Even a colorful planet without pollution that would become more and more grey once the factory grows would be ok since you can disable pollution in settings!

Edit: bumping that

Is there any assumption when color changes will appear in the experimental release? Want to try it so bad...

[Tynach]

Yeah, I'd also love to actually see them in-game. Would love an ETA

[Cadde]

I would love it if the ETA is "When we made it better". Or soon™ + ™

[Impatient]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8fJbShTfEw

That reviewer initially got hooked on the "dark atmosphere" of factorio

[alexk]

Bumping.
Can't wait to try it out.
ETA please?

[Klonan]

Bumping.
Can't wait to try it out.
ETA please?

We don't give ETAs through forum replies, your best hope is to wait for a FFF post with details of our release schedule

[pleegwat]

Bumping.
Can't wait to try it out.
ETA please?

Not before January, so that the devs can relax during the Christmas holidays just like everone else.

[WarpZone]

I actually like the new look? But I feel like it's slightly disingenuous to call this a "restoration." Old colors looked like a rusty industrial oldschool 90's PC game. Like Duke Nukem 3D or Fallout 2. New colors look more like Serious Sam 2 or something.

The entire Look & Feel is different. The new trains, when painted, feel more like toy trains than they used to. The new box art feels like something Maxis would have published. I won't go so far as to say the new colors look like mobile game art (it's not that bad!) but it's definitely a step in that general direction.

I can't help but feel like a saturation slider in the UI would be a good idea. (Essentially modifying the LUT at runtime.) Maybe even a secondary slider for the nighttime color. (The blue looks WAY too blue right now.) That way anyone unhappy with the new look has a shot at tweaking it until it looks more like what they're accustomed to.

Again, I like the new art, but this is a tonal shift. It's a deliberate change in aesthetics, and I think the devs should own it.

(And if the plan was always to shift the tone in this direction, I would have thought you'd start with the music first. The colors just made it look like an old 90's PC game, but that music is like a funeral dirge if you turn it up loud enough.)

[Warteks]

I like it. I agree that the chips are a bit too vibrant, maybe some other things, but I'm seriously interested in seeing what this update looks like! And the trees and water. In fact this has made me finally decide to pay for the game and download a legit copy because frankly I enjoy it, feel you guys deserve the support, and can't live without updates like these. Excited to be part of this community.

So bottom line, I think more color is a good thing. Adds emphasis to your killing the planet as the local vegetation dies too.

[mcwaffles2003]

Why become bluer at night when things get redder as the sun goes down?

[mmmPI]

Why become bluer at night when things get redder as the sun goes down?

I thought this was just a visual convention for movie making. To make night be blue not dark so you can see something, but you know it's supposed to be dark.
( afaik some of the night scene are filmed during the day and colorized afterward, to ease the light management ).


It actually seems to be based on a physiological phenomenon : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect.

In short, light gets redder as sun goes down, but your eyes start seing the blue more to adapt.

[Khagan]

Why become bluer at night when things get redder as the sun goes down?

Direct sunlight gets redder as the sun is going down; but once the sun has gone down, the remaining twilight illumination is via the sky, and is, yes, blue. Later again, there's just starlight (and moonlight, if Nauvis has a moon), which is faint enough that human vision is effectively monochrome anyway.

[Vectura]

I don't know if my monitor is calibrated well or not, but the new colours look nasty to me. I just see a mess of brightness and intense colours, which all just mashes together, far too noisy. Old colours are much clearer, and much more suitable for the aesthetic.

[valneq]

I don't know if my monitor is calibrated well or not, but the new colours look nasty to me. I just see a mess of brightness and intense colours, which all just mashes together, far too noisy. Old colours are much clearer, and much more suitable for the aesthetic.

Have you tried to adjust the colors using the (since 0.18 experimental) new sliders for brightness, contrast, and saturation in the graphics settings?

[Vectura]

Have you tried to adjust the colors using the (since 0.18 experimental) new sliders for brightness, contrast, and saturation in the graphics settings?

No, I have not, haven't tried the experimental yet. WIll do now.

[Itemfinder]

I thought the sprite changes would be great. Upon starting a new game in 0.18 recently, I took issue with the terrain (might only be this biome), inserters, stone furnaces, and bricks to a degree. Then, I launched 0.17 for a side-by-side comparison. It's definitely easier on the eyes. I'm sure there's a middle ground.