While overall I love dynamic lighting options and the progress being made on these tools, I have one particular problem that I would love to see at least an option to change. My issue is this: Colored light heavily washes out images, reducing visual clarity and making for a worse (in my opinion) visual. In more simple terms, color light sources significantly reduce contrast. This leads to a washed out image that is less dramatic, less interesting, and oftentimes less clear. Because this washed out effect applies to tokens as well as maps I find that is not only visually unappealing but mechanically problematic, making it at times harder for my players to see everything, particularly with more extreme colors and lighting situations. What I would like to see is alternative ways in which the light blends with the environment, leading to higher contrast, more interesting visuals. Of course that is probably a difficult concept to grasp, so lets look at some visuals! For those who are familiar with Photoshop and blending modes, a small technical aside others are welcome to skip: As you may have guessed, my idea and the mockups themselves are based heavily on Photoshop blending modes. Playing around briefly in PS, the current Roll20 lighting effects seem akin to creating a color gradient on normal blending mode with opacity reduced to about 50%, which makes sense for this washed out effect we see. My sample mockups instead use Overlay at 75% opacity to achieve much more contrast and a richer image. Im guessing this wont translate 1:1 into Roll20, but you get the idea. Here we see traditional Roll20 dynamic lighting. On one side, colorless, default light. On the other, red. As stated, we can see how the red light washes out the image, giving us dramatically less contrast than the colorless light. So what would an alternative look like? Here is my mockup done in Photoshop, using an alternative method (aka blending mode) of light interacting with the environment. Note how the image has significantly more contrast than the existing lighting system, leading to what I find to be a much more dramatic and satisfying visual. The intent here is simply to show the alternative possibilities, as the overall brightness level, saturation, light radius, etc could easily be adjusted and would surely vary if built into the Roll20 system. In an ideal world I would love to see this as at least an option , complimenting the default settings. Obviously more complex options and UI are a very valid concern but I believe advanced settings that allow for such blending mode changes would be a wonderful boon for those DMs who want better control over the ambience of their scenes, which is ultimately what the dynamic lighting feature is all about!
