A thing with ZDoom that I don't understand

Back in the old days of ZDoom, before GZDoom was ever a thing, whenever I would see screenshots taken or gameplay footage with the source port used, people seemed to have the brightness cranked up pretty high. 

It seems like a lot of folks used to do that back then. Why? Now that I look back on it it's almost sorta funny to me. It just looks so out of place with everything just being such a white-ish tint. I don't think Doom was ever supposed to be that bright.

Edit: made this post entirely on memory. When I did a image search of the port of course I found barely anything that has the brightness cranked up. But I seriously remember back in the day a lot of people playing this source port with the brightness really high

Perhaps the defaults were pretty high back then and people didn't know how to lower it and just got used to the value, or their monitors were really dark.

PrBoom used to have very high gamma defaults as well, and actually, I think it still does on a fresh install when the GZDOOM sector light is selected for the first time. But no, Doom was never meant to be so bright, in fact, with the current defaults in GZDoom, ZDoom, Eternity, and so on, it is technically brighter than what the developers envisioned for the IWADs. A more appropriate value would be 0.90 or a bit lower.

A few ports had an option to add gamma correction to screenshots, and some didn't - or the players didn't know it was an option. So tons of "pro" zdaemon DM screenshots are just washed out and ugly to look at. If you had PCX files on those older ports I think you could repair the damage by replacing the palette (I could be wrong here).

16 hours ago, Csonicgo said:

If you had PCX files on those older ports I think you could repair the damage by replacing the palette (I could be wrong here).

Indeed you can. All ports that write PCX used the code from the original release, which wrote out PCX files in 8bit paletted mode (simply copying the screen buffer and then the palette): https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/77735c3ff0772609e9c8d29e3ce2ab42ff54d20b/linuxdoom-1.10/m_misc.c#L442

Don't know about ZDoom, but for the multiplayer ports I think most competitive players increase gamma a little to increase visibility.  I usually play with 1.4 gamma on Zandronum.  So a lot of multiplayer screen shots probably do have gamma boosted.

I think that's due to CRTs being much darker than modern LCDs. The true way it's meant to be played.

@Blzut3 I sent you a PM about QZDoom devbuilds.

For as long as I've used prboom-plus the software version has been bright, and pressing F11 to cycle back to gamma correction 0 or 1 is one of the first things I do.

But yeah as an example of what OP describes if you look at tatsurdcacocaco's old videos the whole first row of thumbnails is very bright then suddenly not.