Vibrant Visuals: Auto exposure strength is too strong and reacts to brightness change too intensely

Description:

Vibrant Visuals adds auto exposure to the game, balancing total brightness shown on screen by simulating the auto exposure function of real life cameras. However, this feature isn’t working as well as it should have. Bright parts are exposed to an exaggerating point when most of the screen is dark. This is most commonly noticed when holding a torch in a dark area, such as an unlit cave, the nether, or the overworld at night. This really breaks game experience, and may even cause health problems, since your eyes are focused on a dark scene but an intense bright patch(the torch) constantly shines into your eyes from the corner of your screen.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Enable Vibrant Visuals. To have better results, I suggest you also set bloom to any value above 20% in Vibrant Visual settings.

2. Create and join a world, set time to midnight, keep away from all light sources, and hold a torch in your main hand. As 1.png shows, the torch gets overly exposed and becomes painfully bright. Try to make out what your crosshair is pointing at. You shall find that with the intensely bright torch in your hand, it is both hard and painful to do so.

3. Next, place a torch in front of your crosshair. You shall notice that auto exposure kicks in again, and both placed torch and handheld torch becomes normally exposed, as shown in 2.png. Also, you may notice that when placing down the torch, exposure is changed abruptly, far more quickly than the eyes could adapt. It takes a second or more for the eyes to adjust to the new brightness.

Possible Fixes:

Reduce auto exposure strength and speed, or add an auto exposure setting in Video Settings so that players can adjust exposure strength and speed to their own liking. Also, add a cap for exposed colors so they don’t get way too bright. Handheld items should also be put into consideration when calculating exposure strength, or else they can get too bright in a dark scene.

Why does this need fixing?

Auto exposure should be performed at a slower speed with less intensity, so that the human eye could adjust to brightness change in a more natural manner. Abrupt changes in brightness forces the human eye to adjust pupil size rapidly, and may cause stress or even eyesight problems if exposed to such changes for too long. For example, caving using torches causes overall screen brightness to change frequently and exaggeratively for a long stretch of time if Vibrant Visuals are enabled. This is especially stressful for people with myopia.