Baking object with "combined" results in much too bright an Image Texture (Cycles) I am attempting to bake the chairs in a living room scene in Cycles using the "Combined" bake.  When I apply that image texture to the chair it is MUCH too bright compared to a render of the same chair. What other types of bakes should I use and how would I combine them?  The original chair uses a Wood.jpg image texture into a diffused shader mixed with a glossy shader.  I've tried baking diffused direct, diffused color, and glossy, and MixRGB them together, but it looks even worse.  Adding a brightness node &amp; turning down the brightness looks bogus too. What am I missing?




I'm adding some more info, but I don't consider this problem answered because what I came up with is a ridiculous kluge that's sill not quite right.  I've tried so many things that at this point I don't think I can replicate all the bakes I'm using. The chair on the left is the one I'm trying to bake. In a nutshell: 

Two slightly different 'combined' bakes are totally subtracted from each other which leaves shadows too dark &amp; the color messed up. A color adjustment node (RGB Curves) corrects the color which is 'lightened' with a 'diffused color' bake to reduce the shadow from the table.

Like I said, not really a solution.
I can't be sure, but it seems entirely likely that your whites are getting crushed. I can guarantee that the white in your specular highlight on that chair is much higher than "255." But a typical image can only hold up to a 255.

Generically, this situation is handled one of two ways. Either, anything over 255 is just clipped/clamped to 255, or the whole range of values is crushed/scaled so that everything fits in a 0-255 range. This makes all the highlights darker because what used to be between 1000-2000 level of intensity gets scaled down to something like 150-250.

You situation would only be explained if Blender is doing some kind of intensity compensation that's tuning everything down so that your whites are crushed instead of just clipped. I don't know if Blender actually does that or not, but it'd explain what you're seeing.

I also don't know how to solve that, unless you can bake to an EXR or HDR that will record values higher than 255.

Hope that helps.