Light metering (aka. adaptation) in NEON GENESIS
NEON GENESIS tries to simulate light metering instead of other lighting mods' approach, as well as the vanilla game's.
What's the difference?
A light meter is a device used to measure the amount of light. In photography, an exposure meter is a light meter coupled to either a digital or analog calculator which displays the correct shutter speed and f-number for optimum exposure, given a certain lighting situation and film speed. Similarly, exposure meters are also used in the fields of cinematography and scenic design, in order to determine the optimum light level for a scene.
– Taken from the Light meter Wikipedia page.
That description's a bit too nerdy and technical to accurately describe what the difference between the two are in practice. Generally, a light meter doesn't care about any kind of camera center or anything else. All it does is average the light around it and give a reading to adjust exposure according to the reading. The photographer can also add a floor and ceiling to their calculation to make sure there's over– and under– exposure when it's needed.
The default adaptation has other weird addendums to the simplicity of a light meter. There's center importance, which gives more importance to the light calculation to pixels near the center of the screen, and percentage thresholds, which give weights to high and/or low values.
How does NEON GENESIS fix it?
NEON GENESIS sets all of these to zero, and we can get the raw light meter output. By tuning exposureMax and exposureMin, we get to change the aforementioned floor—exposureMax—and ceiling—exposureMin—and yes, those are in the right order.
In practice, we get smooth and near-perfect exposure, which is much less headache-inducing than other solutions, including vanilla's horrible adaptation.
Personally, I feel it even outshines Dravic's fix, because his heavily uses the center importance and percentage threshold values, as well as speed to get a very fast and sensitive adaptation, which in the end is unbalanced between highlights and shadows depending on if they are in the periphery or not.
Addendum Ⅰ
For Atacama
NEON GENESIS Atacama adds to the fixes above by setting the impact of the sky in the histogram calculation to a flat one, which equalizes the math used to calculate the histogram itself.
This has a big effect first-person perspective when driving, fixing a lot of issues with exposure.
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