I'm not sure why you did all of this exactly.
Denoising:
The images aren't noisy. I use a post denoiser already as part of every render and aside from some fringe low light situations, pretty much every render is noise-free.
Color Correction:
I have the saturation turned up a little bit intentionally. I will agree that some scenes are a little warm but most of the scenes look pretty good. I wanted something that felt rich and full of color. Auto color correcting just leads to everything looking desaturated and bland. I wanted a nice warm cozy feeling. In a lot of the images you used as examples, it's either early morning or late night which usually has lower light levels with a temperature or mood related to it.
Exposure Adjustments:
I've talked extensively in the past about how cranking the exposure like what you've done only leads to more issues for the before/after scenes. You can very easily end up in a situation that leads with the light levels bouncing around every other scene which just completely screws the feel of it.
I've made 3 brightening passes on the game since its launch and I won't be doing another. This is going to be one of those situations where I'm going to actively advise people both here in the comments and in the intro of the game that dark scenery exists, don't play next to lamps, open windows, spotlights, or the literal sun. I've had numerous people who've come and fussed about the lighting only to reveal that they are playing in non-ideal conditions. I had one dude on a laptop from 2012, in their living room, with their back to a bay window, and with the curtains open. (Not even joking, that was one of the instances I've dealt with.)
Compression:
I've said in the past few days and in my patreon/substar post earlier today that I'll be doing a compression pass on the game soon and it's looking like I should probably be able to get the game well below a gb in size.
I read your FAQ, and I also found the scenes dark, so I threw one or two images into Photoshop and used auto color to see how it looked. I thought it looked good, so I decided to do this for all the images to see how it would turn out and decided to post the result here.
As I mentioned, it wasn't necessary for all the images, but it was definitely needed for some. Using auto color is far from ideal, but we could see how it could improve. That's why I also mentioned that the ideal would be individual post-processing for each image, leaving the images as you would like and not as Photoshop thinks would be best.
I understand your intention to use warm colors and agree with it, I think it looks better this way, but some images were still too dark. For example, it doesn't make much sense for it to be so dark at 6 AM; it looked like night.
Regarding the denoiser, I didn't even check if it was necessary, but it was something quick, so I decided to use it too.
Anyway, I didn't do this because I thought it would look better than the original, I decided to try this after reading what you wrote in your FAQ, and I posted the result here. I don't think either is ideal, the original or the one with auto color, but I don't care that much, if it weren't for the mention in your FAQ, I would never have considered doing this.
And about the previous post, I didn't criticize the number of renders but rather the pacing of the story, considering the number of updates in the changelog, it's strange to still be in the prologue, I read other comments about this and agreed.
Anyway, there's no need to be defensive about what I wrote, it's your game, you do as you see fit, my comment only contains my opinion, I don't usually play games like this, I was interested and decided to leave a comment.
Even if nothing changes, I will still follow the development of your game.
