Doom_RO :
-it's possible your thread inspired me to do this =)
-Doom 2016 textures are not accessible yet, and as they're baked in mega textures. I think this will be very complicated to do.
Miller :
You are right, the global lighting lowered contrast and saturation, it's a bit bland.
I aimed for a not too contrasted lighting, and as constant as possible between all textures, a bit in the spirit of the id's textures (especially quake 1 & 2 ones, doom still had some heavy contrasted things). So I tend to avoid black shadows as much as possible.
I think it's because a too much visible lighting (very true for very dark shadows that implies a big HDR range (direct sunlight) : a dark color or shadow on a wall, in a very bright sector or outside will stay very dark, and counter the environment lighting balance.
Most of the time this will make things less immersive (indoor, cloudy or in the shadow), you'll see things more like textures/drawings/paper on walls than architecture volumes and "real" materials.
It's hard to find the right balance for all textures at the same time.
-I wanted to do a "contrast" pass before moving to 256 colors, but I was too hungry/impatient and tired (so many dozen of hours in this project... for an average 5 minute per texture X 1650 = 140 hours minimum)
- Using the original Diffuse as a color layer can enhance things ( see below), but it removes some subtle realistic lighting effects at the same time, like looking up things are blueish, and looking down are more brown.
-I need additional experience on the conversion workflow.
The doom palette conversion doesn't work very well sometimes as everybody knows (for those damn blues and reds(flesh and blood) as mentioned by 40oz, or the low saturation greens. however oranges are surprisingly not working that bad).
-I now add some saturation before palette conversion, this makes colors (browns most of the time) more vibrants and almost existing in the palette, this creates more colors, subtle grey/brown mixes,(id's style) instead of full boring grey textures (but this can break the original design/spirit...well you can't win everywhere).
Maybe I'll have to reconvert some of the first paletted ones.
I'll probably do a V3 later, more color/contrast and a bit more arcady. I still need to play with these ingame to be sure of the best adjustments I could try to fit the rest of the world/monsters.
So going to a first full "usable" release has become the priority.
This is why I skipped the contrast pass : I need feedback like the one you did, or maybe other people playing with these textures, maybe starting making some first maps and raise problems.
I've done a first wad with the Hicolor ones, started a small map, but I'm a beginner (in some way because I did maps with DEU 5.4 when I was younger :D ) and I'm still quite slow at maping.
So the priority is set back to a first release.
For your test : your texture is the Hangar's Jumbo Door (dirty, more colors), and my one is the Jumbo Door (grey, blue, white, quite clean).
I used original colors, in this Jumbo Door texture, the marks and signs are white and not yellow for instance, I don't intend to modify those original colors, even if that's cool, the purpose of this conversion is to bake light on original ones, not alter them artistically, just technically.
to sum up, sorry for this long post : I agree on the low contrast/saturation issue, and will probably adress it later :).
here are some tests of mine, for the possible V3 adjustments ( :
Tip : four your own conversion technique, do not use the normal map directly, it's in openGL format (Y aiming down), so the lighting looks reversed.
So before using it, you have to do an inverse on the green channel (Direct X format), it will look more natural then.
