Displaying images with a black background in a consistent way is difficult. Very few people bother to calibrate their monitors, so their screen brightness is usually too low or too high. As a result, the black levels of any two randomly selected display devices are typically quite different. Parts of an image that should be black appear grey when the brightness is too high, while parts of the image that contain dim pixels appear black if the brightness is too low. I have tried to find a set of image parameters in GSnap’s rendering scheme that will display reasonably well on a wide variety of display devices, but I think I may have to try using a slightly different pixel value scaling rule eventually (at the moment, I just use a power law that is clipped above a certain maximum value). Here are three images that use the best combination of parameters that I’ve found thus far. I have not added noise to these images (as mentioned in the previous post)





The contrast of the display device also has an effect, but it is not quite as drastic as the brightness. When the colors are negated, it is sometimes possible to see details that were not visible in the original images:

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