Gamma Correction Tutorial

This is a tutorial I did about gamma correction in Maya (Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2). I was having problems with the physical sun and sky in Maya's mental ray indirect lighting tab washing out many of the colors in my scene. I liked the physical sun and sky because of the realistic lighting they could provide, but I didn't like the  way that the colors washed out, so I googled the problem and found out that the problem was because the gamma settings were too high, and I found some tutorials to fix the problem.

Above is a picture of what the scene looked like initially. As you can see, the avocados are washed out, and their green-brown color is not as vivid as I would like.

Above is a picture after I made some adjustments. I changed the texture on the avocados from a blinn to a mia_material_x and enabled ambient occlusion to make the texture look better. Then, I lowered the pedestal level in the mia_exposure_simple1 node to -0.05 to make the shadows a bit darker, which helped some, but I still wanted to make the avocados less washed out. I tried lowering the gamma in the node, but it made everything darker, and I only wanted to make the avocados darker and more vivid.

Above is the finished product. I kept reduced the pedestal level to -0.04 to make the shadows not quite so dark, and I added a gamma correction node to the avocado texture with three values of 0.8 to darken just the avocado texture and make it less washed out. Finally, just made a few changes to some of the textures in the scene, like the bowl and the granite, and I added a backsplash to the counter to make it look nice. Overall, this tutorials was not too bad, mostly just tweaking values and adjusting some of the textures. It was a great tutorial to fix the problem with the physical sun and sky object washing out the colors, and overall I feel like it makes the scene look a lot better.