80 hours a week during tax season for a tax accountant doesn't sound unreasonable at all.

Yeah, HIDs in a reflector housing are a complete disaster. At least with the average LED bulb the beam pattern sort of matches what you would get from a halogen bulb (there are some that are really close now but they're super expensive). With HIDs the beam pattern is completely different and so the headlight often ends up throwing more light up, to the sides, and immediately in front of the car than down the road where you actually want it. What ends up happening is not only do you blind everybody but everything else is so bright, and so little light actually makes it down the road, that you're visibility can actually end up being noticeably worse since your night vision is impaired by how bright everything is immediately around you.

Housings designed for halogens with a refractor design can still be ok with LED bulbs, especially if they're retrofit with the new ultrathin type LED bulbs so they can produce a sharp cutoff. Reflector housings should never be used with LED, or HID, bulbs though. That combination is the absolute worst.

Good lord that's the perfect term for it.

The "kindness" the post is describing basically amounts to "ignore the rules of driving and do whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy". If you want to be kind then following traffic pattern rules is the best way to do it.

> Friend from Boston says she absolutely hates Vermont drivers because the friendliness can actually create dangerous situations. I see it all the time now

It's not really a VT thing, it's a rural driver thing. The whole being super friendly while driving and making exceptions works fine when there's almost no traffic to deal with but it quickly becomes problematic as traffic density increases. It takes a little while for rural drivers to learn that ruthlessly enforcing traffic pattern rules is actually the most polite way to drive.

I also enjoy how people try to get other drivers to go by waving to them through the glass without realizing glare often makes it nearly impossible to see through the windshield. Just flick your high beams to signal other drivers.

Subaru uses the high beams for DRLs but they run at a low voltage so they should be just barely visible. If you put aftermarket LED or HID bulbs into the high beam housing the bulbs don't understand that they're supposed to run at low output and instead run full blast.

This thread is freaking hilarious. So many people who clearly have no clue what they're talking about being so damned confident. It's absolutely shitty post-processing, like I said it's reminiscent of the "HDR-hole", but there's nowhere the guy painted in color. If you had any experience with photo post-processing it would be painfully obvious what actually happened but please continue basking in your ignorance.

> Modern lights are brighter than 10 years ago, most new SUVs and trucks set on low beam project as far as a high beam was a few years back, and some high beams are now downright blinding.

They're brighter, but the beam pattern is also vastly better controlled. On a reasonably flat road if I'm driving against oncoming traffic I'd absolutely prefer to have a modern LED headlight coming at me than a traditional halogen in a reflector housing. Where this doesn't work out so well though is on roads with a lot of undulation (i.e. most of Vermont) where even with a well controlled beam pattern you're going to be periodically shining headlights directly into the cabin of oncoming traffic or cars you're following.

The real problem though is people who put HID/LED bulbs into reflector housings; now you get the worst of all scenarios: headlights output much more light, the beam pattern is completely unfocused because reflector housing cannot handle HID or LED lights properly, and to make matters worse while the ground right in front of the modified vehicle often appears brighter how far down the road people can actually see is decreased so they're more likely to run their high beams more often anyway.

On this note, self darkening rear view and side view mirrors are one of the best add-ons I've experienced yet for a car.

What you're seeing is a combination of color bleeding due to aggressive color noise reduction and a hue shift due to how the color saturation was exaggerated. In the raw image data you get a lot of colored speckling called chroma noise and the more you do to reduce this the more colors from adjacent objects will bleed into each other. This is especially apparent when dealing with tightly packed relatively colorful objects like foliage. Red hues from leaves from one tree will bleed into the bark of an adjacent tree or the water near the trees. The other issue is that when you see a bare tree that is "brown" it's not represented simply as brown in the data, but as a superposition of the color channels. When you exaggerate the oranges and reds in order to makes to leaves look better, you'll also distort other colors like browns and if you have areas that were already pretty intense they can end up getting blown out in one of the color channels. The sample you provided there certainly looks like it was done by someone in the "HDR hole" stage of photo post-processing but there's no signs of actual manipulation other than going nuts with saturation sliders.

It's absolutely overly post-processed and looks dumb, but your claims that things are outright faked is just wrong and shows you have little understanding of photo post-processing.

Nah, this is just cranking up the saturation and vibrance. That will often exaggerate color variations that aren't as obvious to the naked eye.