A few things here despite your real-life experience:
Tail lights always look okay in broad daylight conditions
Tail lights always look okay during night driving, particularly when it’s pitch black
Tail lights ONLY look funny in low contrast, foggy, hazy, cloudy, low contrast conditions
Tail lights look funny at all angles (color does not change and remains bright yellow)
How do you explain this? SDR is the problem?
If I’m driving directly behind a 458 in real life or a M3, say, their tail lights is not some trippy disco machine that will change colors. It always appears red and should appear red because I’m driving directly behind them (same with Forza in chase cam).
In real life under certain conditions, you do see red brake or tail lights take slightly different colors. They can appear in parts to be white, yellow, orange and such depending on the refraction of light and colour under certain conditions. So yes, what you see in Forza can happen in real life.
I live right by the sea so we get a lot of mist and fog and I regularly see variations in colour of the tail lights.
In Forza, from my experience, the taillights and brake lights are perfectly fine and realistic. If the brake lights or taillights are constantly orange that points to a display issue.
I’d like to talk about the pictures directly above this post, and this picture, that was shared a few posts ago.
LED taillights with red diodes have no other wavelengths… The Ferrari in the pic here has red LED tails. They look a little pink, because they are bright enough to over-expose the camera sensor.
Most cars until recently have used clear, standard incandescent bulbs in the taillights, filtered to red through colored plastic. These taillights can be seen as orange, or yellow, in the right conditions, particularly darker conditions, and through a camera. The Huracan above has small clusters of LEDs in the inside-top of the tails. These are pink, like the Ferrari. The remainder of the clusters, and both tails of the Mustang ahead, are lit with white incandescents. While the primary color to the eye is red, there are plenty of infrared and yellow wavelengths that leak through the red taillight lens. Rather than over-expose the sensor into pink, and eventually white, like red LEDs will, the captured tone shifts to orange, or yellow.
Recognizing that taillights do appear (to cameras) as different colors than the lenses or convention would suggest, and Turn 10’s effort to replicate that:
Problem #1: LED and incandescent tails need different low-light effects, even when present in the same housing (like the Huracan). The 720S shown above has red LED tails. They should never render yellow, or orange. Only red, or pink-red.
Problem #2: FM7 renders taillights red in well-lit conditions, orange/yellow in dim conditions, and red again in dark conditions. The effect should be negatively correlated to ambient lighting. Dark conditions should have the strongest “taillights aren’t pure red” effect.
Problem #3: My eyes aren’t cameras. I could care less about this effect, outside of photo mode.
The problem is the way FM7 renders these tail lights. E.g. on most cars if not all - the tail lights will appear bright yellow specifically in low contrast day driving conditions. They will never, and I mean never take any other color aside from red when driving at night or driving in broad daylight with minimal cloud cover. But - ironically, at night, there’s almost no visible halo or glow around the red tail lights. How strange is that?
It’s an autoexposure problem and I think T10 may have tried to replicate what tail light colors might look like at different times of day when seen through a camera lens - and not the human eye <— THAT I think is the problem.
Reaction of light and color can change the headlights to a more orange / white-ish color depending on the conditions in real life. Fog and mist can easily do this or when extremity high humidity or heatwaves.
My point is certain conditions can cause this. The problem is people constantly having orange and white headlights but if that’s the case, it’s clearly a display issue or a poorly calibrated display.
Older SDR displays can’t produce accurate enough colors compared to modern HDR professionally calibrated displays. That’s just a fact. It’s obvious SDR is just not going to look as good.
Well, regarding your last point - this still doesn’t explain why F7 is the only game with tail lights looking funny? And that too only in low contrast daytime driving conditions. If I had a high-end mobile phone camera, I’d show you just how good colours look on my TV in every game I play or every movie I’ve seen to date. I have an eye for these things and very picky when it comes to correct calibration for entertainment purposes.
The over-exposure and bloom issue is definitely accountable for the odd bloom effect around brakelights but I’m not understanding your train of thought.
Low contrast, low light conditions can cause brake lights to appear a different colour in real life, so I’m confused as to why it’s a problem in game?
I have traveled the world and not in a single city have I seen car brake lights looking bright yellow and washed out due to ‘low contrast lighting conditions’…
Not sure what you’re getting at. Please check those photos again (in this thread and the other one)
Edit:
More annoying brake light shots to proof my point -
Photo 1: The LaF in real life has a very satisfying bright red glow to the brake lights not bright orange or yellow. The Venom GT in front of my car has more realistic looking brake lights but the inside tail lights seem orange to me, not red.
Photo 2 & 3: The Cinque roadster is one of the biggest culprits with the brake lights never looking right and taking an ugly yellow neon color when you brake.
Photo 4: The Testa Rosa is showing those same ugly yellow brakes in low contrast conditions. The R8 closest to the camera kind of has red tail lights, but look more bright orange than red. And the F40’s tail lights are red but no glow at all to indicate there’s actually a bulb behind the tail light cover.
Photo 5 & 6: Sonoma in cloudy and low contrast conditions is where this effect really shows as you can see from the Chevy SS’s bright yellow brakes. In photo 6, when I’m not braking (it’s the fast left hander that leads to the start finish/line), the tail lights somewhat look red I suppose, but look at those drag strip starting lights. They’re glowing which is nice but why are they almost white? They should look green or red.
It’s not my TV Evan - it’s just plain bad color calibration and autoexposure not working properly within the game. Brake lights get wayyy to overexposed and washed out in cloudy, darker and low contrast conditions. Not much of a problem during broad daylight driving with minimal cloud cover and pitchblack night driving.
The color is fine but there should be a least some bloom if the “camera” is over-exposed. All the detail in the taillights… should be blurred or obscured if the color is distorted so far. That’s what stands out to me.
The ambient-light taillight color shift effect is a good idea, but it needs refinement and consistency across conditions (strongest at night, absent in bright daylight). Right now it’s just immersion-breaking–“who replaced my brake lights with turn signals?”
Red LEDs should never appear yellow–they don’t produce any other wavelengths than visible red. Overexposure turns them pink, eventually white. White LEDs filtered to red could overexpose to yellow. AFAIK reds are cheaper to make, and brighter than filtered whites, so most LED tails have red diodes.
What kind of screen are you on? Are you seeing washed out or otherwise funny looking tail lights in FM7, FH4 and PCARS2 under specific track conditions only?
I was driving at Road Atlanta the other day, and it kind of pissed me off to see bright orange brake lights on my 70s Trans Am!
FH4 has the opposite problem. Too many tails over-expose to white/pink, instead of orange, like they should. They never wash out though. If they turn white it’s only in the brightest area and accompanied by bloom. Overall, it feels natural. I haven’t touched FM7 or PCars 2 in a while.
Edit: I’ve found pictures of incandescent taillights with pink over-exposure. Most are orange/yellow… but by that point there is strong blooming too, occluding the detail and blurring the shape of the lens/cluster. To reasonably shift the color of tails all the way to yellow, or white, overwhelming bloom should be present as well…
I use an LG 25UM58-P. It’s a 25-inch, 1080p 21:9. It’s like a 27-inch 1440p with 360 vertical pixels removed.
I get the exact same tail lights in FH4 as well. They’re nowhere as washed out, flat or just eerily bright yellow as FM7 but, thankfully, at least they somewhat resemble real tail lights. If they copy/paste FH4’s tail lights into FM7, honestly I’d be happy with those.
I am using an HDR enabled LG OLED TV and I have it setup to use HDR in Forza Motorsport 7 and I still am able to see the those “orange” break lights. I think it’s less of a problem with the HDR implementation and more of a design choice by the developers.
To be honest I would not have noticed this without people talking about it here and actually it doesn’t change my enjoyment of the game. I stumbled upon this topic while trying to figure out why each tunnel is so dark in this game, since the car headlights cast no light on those tracks, but I could improve the issue by raising the brightness in the main menu options.
Thanks for lending your thoughts - I knew this was not a TV-specific issue. The brake lights seem to lean more towards bright orange, even bright yellow under specific track counditions like too cloudy or overcast - or early morning, late afternoon settings. And, around certain parts of the track, they will start to glow orange.
It is wildly inconsistent and clearly shows an issue with the auto-exposure feature of the game. The brake lights look perfectly okay to me in FM5 and 6. It doesn’t change my enjoyment of the game either - but makes me wonder why it’s even an issue to begin with, since they were so heavily advertising 4K/HDR/60 fps from the get-go. I might have been okay with it if it were an issue in older FM games - but it’s never been one, so why now?
Is there even a quality testing team in the company anymore?
Like I mentioned I believe it is a design choice. My guess is that the art directors wanted to sell an artistically more gloomy and more dramatic looking game, maybe even so the HDR contrast is more eye-popping when you have bright light sources in dark images. The rain sections certainly look way more darker in FM 7 than in FM 6, here is a nice comparison video showing the difference between FM 6 & FM 7 in rain:
Another theory I have since those tail lights are now more visible during low-light races (in FM6 you can barely tell if the tail light is on or not) the developers/designers maybe decided to use orange break lights so the player can tell if cars in front are actually breaking or not.
Also found a nice video showing off the orange tail lights during a night race:
Makes a lot of sense - but what a strange and unorthodox design choice it is!
Check out some of these screens.
The most unsettling ones are the ones where tail lights glow bright yellow, with the result that in certain low contrast track conditions where it’s either completely overcast or a sunrise/sunset/late afternoon settings, the ‘third’ tail light will lose color almost completely, along with exhaust flames - the latter actually look more like a muzzle flash than exhaust flames.
By chance I stumbled upon a racing game comparison video, where someone is comparing Forza 7, DriveClub, Project CARS 2 and Gran Turismo Sport. The video has a 2014 Chevrolet Corvette C7 (except for Forza 7 where they use the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS) driven in the games during daylight:
Apparently nowadays many racing games have this “issue” with displaying break lights in an orange color.
Here’s a screenshot from Project CARS 2 at 1:52:
Here’s a screenshot from Gran Turismo Sport at 2.24:
Here’s also a screenshot from Forza Horizon 3:
Apparently DriveClub and GRID (2019) display break lights in a red color.
