Is it me, or is the show LITERALLY insanely dark?

[Tesophius]

Sounds like cinematic lighting is code for bad lighting, just like gritty has been code for shitty for about 20 years now.

 

[Mage]

For those care, I might have found the problem with my set, and perhaps other who find the show so dark can benefit from it...

Turns out, my smart tv is too smart for its own good. Whenever there's a new kind of signal, I need to fiddle with the settings for that specific setting. Noticed this when I played some 4K material on Netflix once. Since this show is HDR, it's also a new signal appereantly. I set all my settings to what I always have, except for one....
I had to turn off all the eco-settings as well. My set has a lightsensor, and with some of those eco-settings on, it will change the backlighting and brightness somewhat during viewing, to what the set thinks should be good for that specific enviroment.... Dunno who ever thought that was good. But while switching it off, I already noticed the scene becoming slightly brighter. It was a brightly lit scene, in the messhall on Discovery, but still.....

 

[Tesophius]

It's either overwhelmingly blue or really dark/black. I can't think of a scene where colors looked normal. Is this the way it looks for everyone else? It's sharper in reality.

 

[Refuge]

It's either overwhelmingly blue or really dark/black. I can't think of a scene where colors looked normal. Is this the way it looks for everyone else? It's sharper in reality.

That's how it screens for me too.

 

[Midquest]

I can honestly say that mine does not look like that:

In fact, the lighting is beautiful (to my eyes, obviously). I've watched this show on...I think four? devices. The color has been clean and not overly blue on any of them; likewise, at no point have I had any difficulty seeing detail. I was, in fact, struck by how not dark the show was given initial concerns.

Hmm...

 

[SPCTRE]

It's either overwhelmingly blue or really dark/black. I can't think of a scene where colors looked normal. Is this the way it looks for everyone else? It's sharper in reality.

the only thing overly blue here is your entertainment center

 

[ralfy]

Yes, definitely too dark, and pointless as well.

 

[Cake]

I can honestly say that mine does not look like that:

In fact, the lighting is beautiful (to my eyes, obviously). I've watched this show on...I think four? devices. The color has been clean and not overly blue on any of them; likewise, at no point have I had any difficulty seeing detail. I was, in fact, struck by how not dark the show was given initial concerns.

Hmm...

In this picture I can hardly see Burnham's facial expression, if I don't change the settings on my PC screen and lighten it up a lot. But when I do that the white and grey background of the trekbbs forum is getting way too bright and uncomfortable for my eyes.

 

[seigezunt]

And if it were brighter, people would be complaining that "it looks like the Apple Store."

 

[Sci-fi fan]

The show has two main problems. One, it's indeed filled with extremely irritable and dark characters which is not bad in itself but that's the norm in other shows so it's one of the same to not pursue a more TNG-esque motif and two, most characters are too uninteresting.

 

[Cake]

And if it were brighter, people would be complaining that "it looks like the Apple Store."

Not me. I liked the light on the bridge of the new movies.

 

[lawman]

It's just following the trends of using more cinematic lighting and set design.

Honestly, the producers are probably confused as hell with Trek fans (what else is new)? You get a bright and upbeat bridge set for the JJ movies and everyone throws feces at that comparing it to an Apple Store. You go with dark/moody/realistic in Discovery, and everyone thinks they're watching Bladerunner on a TV with no backlight.

Can't win.

False dichotomy. Has it occurred to you that the lighting was simply bad in both examples, albeit in different ways? In the Abrams films, anyone on the bridge was at risk of getting blinded by glare. (And that was a deliberate choice; a lot of the "lens flares" were added digitally.) In STD, they're at risk of getting eyestrain.

Calling STD's lighting "cinematic" is a compliment it hasn't earned. I've spent much of my life watching movies. Most of them are lit in ways that make them, literally, easier to watch than this.

Calling it "realistic" is simply misleading. A starship is a work environment. Who keeps their work environment in a perpetual dim twilight? That's not realistic in the slightest.

And yeah, the color balance seems off too. During the scenes aboard the Glenn, it literally looked to me like some characters had streaks of blue makeup across their faces.

FWIW, though, I will say that to my eyes, both the lighting and the overall design sensibility of the show did improve markedly in the latest episode as compared to the opening two-parter.

 

[Mage]

The show has two main problems. One, it's indeed filled with extremely irritable and dark characters which is not bad in itself but that's the norm in other shows so it's one of the same to not pursue a more TNG-esque motif and two, most characters are too uninteresting.

Not what we're discussing here. Let's keep it on topic ok, instead of making it another 'Discovery Sucks' topic?

 

[Reanok]

I thought episode 3 was way too dark. Some of the scenes all I could hear was voices and could hardly see what was happening to the characters on the U.S.S. Glenn.