Exported texture colors are washed out (posterized, reduced colors)

[kentzversky]

Hi All!
Incredible tool, love it. However, I noticed a strange issue on some of my projects with texture export quality. Here’s my quite basic rig:

I clearly understand that I’m compressing the range heavily. However, what I see in preview window is ok (and I can save it, zoomed crop):

differs from my output dramatically (zoomed crop):

(maybe you will need to open images in full size to see lost details clearly) …whatever I do, like setting output to 32 bit, saving to PNG, setting nodes to Full32 and still the same. It differs in color tone and amount of details. Looks like color depth is reduced somewhere during export process.
I’m ready to provide my project files if this could help.

I finished with saving right from preview window button (which gives correct result) but it’s not the way things are designed to work I guess.

Can someone kindly point out my mistake, how can I get same result via export, compatible to saving from preview window?

Thanks.

[kentzversky]

Anyone?

19 views for 3 days, seriously. I thought such a wonderful soft should already have a giant army of followers.

Do developers look into this place? Maybe someone will recommend a better
place for asking?

Here I’m attaching a package file so you may check for an issue yourself.

Unnamed Element.IMP (1.3 MB)

Thanks!

[kentzversky]

Can anyone at least open the file and confirm that it’s not my local setups related, please?
Thanks!

[Pixby]

Hello @kentzversky and welcome to our community.

Thank you for your post. We apologize for the delay in response. Many of us were at SIGGRAPH last week and were not able to respond immediately to your post.

I will report this internally and provide additional information ass soon as it becomes available.

Thanks again!

[voidberg]

Welcome to the forum @kentzversky - as Pixby mentioned, a large part of the community folks were at SIGGRAPH. Also, forums are not as popular as they used to be in 2024 - I think most people flock to more immediate discussion platforms like Discord or X.

The best working mode that should maximize compatibiltity is Normalized16 and exporting at 8bpp. MAT will still compute all of your image at 16bpp but will downsample to 8bpp right when writing the file, which will maximize compatbility.

Thanks for attaching the file, I’ll check it out on my machine.

[voidberg]

I had no issues exporting your image at both 8bpp PNG and 16bpp PNG using a Normalized16 execution.

I wonder, maybe it’s the viewer? Could you try it in Affinity Photo or a similar package?

[kentzversky]

@voidberg

working mode that should maximize compatibiltity is Normalized16 and exporting at 8bpp

Thanks for your reply. I will continue discussion here if you don’t mind. Here are two output files (from preview window and as regular export), you may check yourself.

I’m actually exporting the same project that you have attached above. The only difference I may imagine between you and me could be in Export options or Program global options. Here’s my:

[Pixby]

Thanks for the additional information @kentzversky. I’ve passed this along internally.

Thanks!

[kentzversky]

Hi! Any updates so far?

[voidberg]

The output window export is going through a different export pipeline than the direct export. It appears that you export as JPG, did you already try to export as PNG?

[kentzversky]

Yes, both were PNG initially. Looks identical to posted ones. Converted to JPG to save some traffic.

[voidberg]

It appears that the issue with the color-space inaccuracy of the “Image Viewer” is resolved internally and the next version should produce the same color as the export path.

[kentzversky]

Could you kindly clarify what is “Image Viewer”? Are you talking about some Instamat bug?

[Pixby]

The Image Viewer is the UI used for viewing 2D images.

[kentzversky]

Thanks for your reply. When do you think we could expect this update to roll out?

[voidberg]

It should not be far off, however, I cannot provide an ETA.