Layout Brightness / Contrast

    The Brightness/Contrast plug-in is a plug-in that lets you adjust the brightness and contrast of your rendered image.  Often, you can counteract the "perfect" look of CGI by tweaking the brightness and contrast of an image.  The contrast, in particular, gives light a certain "harshness" that tends to be more realistic than the perfectly diffused LW lights.  With this plug-in, you can bypass the whole step of Photoshop or Premiere to post-process your image.  By setting up a brightness control object, you could do fade-to-black straight from LightWave!  Or, you could use animated brightness and contrast to wash out the picture after a nuclear blast in your own T2 adaptation.
    The plug-in is found on the Effects panel, under the Image Processing tab, as an Image Filter plug-in.  Activate RealiTools_Brightness/Contrast.  On the options panel, there are a few controls to let you customize the effect.  If you only need an unchanging effect, you can use Constant brightness value and Constant contrast value, which go from -100 to 100 percent.  To animate them, begin by choosing an object in the scene to do so with.  (NullObjects are usually what you'd use for this.)  Choose that object from the control object drop-down list.  The control axis list lets you choose which axis of motion to use to control the effect.  On whatever axis you choose, you can control the effect by moving the object anywhere from -100 to 100 units.

Tutorial
    Let's use Brightness/Contrast to make a fade-out like we mentioned earlier.  If you have LightWave 5.5, you can click on any of the following links to load up the object or scene they point to.

1. Open Layout and load the_end.lwo.
2. For frames 0 to 30, make it do some kind of fly-in.
3. Add a nullObject to control the brightness.  Rename it brightness_null.
4. From frame 30 to frame 60, move brightness_null to -100 units on the Y axis.  Don't forget to activate "Linear" on the keyframe at frame 30!
5. Activate RealiTools_Brightness/Contrast.  Click Options.
6. For Brightness control object, choose brightness_null.  Choose "Y axis" for the Brightness control axis.  Click Ok.

That's it!  Your scene should now look like this.