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Brightness Shadows

 Brightness Shadows
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 FeatureClass
 Brightness Shadows
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 Brightness Shadows
 Brightness Shadows
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 BrightnessShadows
 Brightness Shadows
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 When a story wants to demonstrate a light is blindingly bright, it's often impractical to have it illuminate in an additive way on top of the ambient lighting. Just making a scene brighter doesn't look that impactful (base color palettes are already pretty bright), and lightening everything further can make the visuals less dramatic, not more.
Instead, artists will generally increase the contrast of the shading to represent how bright a light is, with brighter lights somehow generating shadows that overwrite the existing lighting.
Needless to say, this is not how light works in real life, which can lead to some strange consequences. At it's most absurd, the addition of a light source may darken the subject it's trying to illuminate.
Sometimes this effect is meant to represent the difficulty our eyes have adjusting to bright lights by obscuring the newly created shadowed area. It's also often a consequence of standard color correction efforts. Ironically, extreme brightness doesn't feel bright unless something else is made darker for juxtaposition and context.
Even in flat cartoon art that normally lacks shading, bright lights may create dark shadows that don't exist anywhere else in the work. This can be used for situational effects, such as to makes explosions look more cool. This is also fairly common when characters get electrocuted, and may be combined with X-Ray Sparks. It might also be a property of a Battle Aura. When taken to its logical extreme with flash grenades/nuclear explosions, shadows often will become pitch black.
See also Hollywood Darkness, which also plays with our expectations of light.
Subtrope of Chiaroscuro.
Examples:
 Brightness Shadows
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 Brightness Shadows
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 Brightness Shadows
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 DBTropes

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Brightness Shadows
processingCategory2
 Lighting Tropes
 Doraemon: Nobita's Sky Utopia / int_d2ea5e7d
type
 Brightness Shadows
 ANNO: Mutationem (Video Game) / int_d2ea5e7d
type
 Brightness Shadows
 Teen Titans (2003) / int_d2ea5e7d
type
 Brightness Shadows