Update - End of Iku's date night (Patreon)

tl;dr - I'm planning a new PAT release early this month, and I've been trying out a new approach to image adjustment.

This week's image

This week I've got some stuff to show with the PAL characters. The first is an image of Iku; I've been making a few of these pictures on a general theme of first person perspective shots on a date with her. They're just supposed to be nice and innocent - she's nervous, but she had a lovely time and now you're back at her place. ;) I'll show the more SFW pictures from this night on a public post, I think, although I've also shown them on Discord and one of them's on Twitter.

I've also got another PAL image below!

Timelapse progress

For the next game update I'm looking to have a release fairly soon. I wanted to make some technical updates and I may still do so, but mostly I just want to get back onto a schedule with releases early in the month. Technical updates slow me down way more than simple content updates generally, so adding a few more Nobuko scenes (as I plan to) shouldn't be too difficult to get done, particularly since I've got a fair bit of progress done on them.

I'd like to put out an official new public update soon too; a version of 0.7, but I've been hoping that it would actually have the recent technical quirks ironed out before I do so. We'll see.

More image adjustment?

In past I've tended to avoid heavy use of contrast and vibrancy enhancements in my images, because it feels like it could be a little tacky. I've recently been using this to avoid the "washed out" look a bit more often and I've been happy with the results. Even more recently, I've been thinking that maybe I should actually be pushing the richness of the colour palette and contrast a bit more, since my visual style is already quite stylised and it might suit it better.

Here I took an image I already thought was good and then went in to do some more enhancement of it. Hiroshi content warning!

And here's the adjusted version:

So first up I should acknowledge that one thing I was testing with the adjusted version was the new AI Gigapixel update, which can enhance the pixel size of an image and it's just got better at handling faces, so part of the reason the second version might look better is that it's just a higher resolution. But aside from that, I was basically just giving it a boost in Photoshop to see how it might turn out and I think it looks a fair bit better.

I should note that there's a fire in the fireplace in this scene, so it gives the whole thing a particularly orange look, (and you can see the glow on her leg) but I'm quite happy with how Kim's skin looks here, in particular.

I'll probably try out some more of this kind of thing for future updates, so if you notice there's more vibrance in new pictures, that's probably why.

What do you think of the Iku date pic? And probably more importantly, what do you think about the stronger colour palette I demonstrated on the Kimiko pics? Let me know in the comments!