The clothes in skyrim. Theres something off about them.

The only clean clothes are emporers robes, ulfrics outfit, coat fine clothes, blue tabard dress/outfit and thalmor stuff.

The rest looks weirdly dirty, for no reason.

Fine clothes look dirty. Red and blue coat dress/outfit looks worn or badly dyed.
Tabard dress/outfit looks dirty in red.

Fine boots look worse than the boots sometimes
.
You get the fine clothes for the radiant raiment quest and think, seriously, you're selling stuff new with that dirt on them?

If this a bad attempt at shadows or something? Because somethings gone wrong. They managed shadows in FO3 and FONV, wihtout making clothes look dirty, but apparently they forgot how in skyrim.
Or can the people of skyrim not wash clothes, or dye cloth properly.

Everything else looks clean.

In Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, there are clothes that look a hell of a lot cleaner. And shadows on them that look hell of a lot crisper.
In fact, if it is'nt marked 'dirty' or 'grimy', it's clean.
The exception is prewar springwear and prewar parkstroller outfit in FONV, for some reason they're worn looking in it. But at least they've been washed.

In a post apocolyptic world, with radiation, mutants, rad mutants and a lack of industry, they manage to keep their clothes clean.

But in a normal world, they don't know what clothes washing is.
Or dying cloth properly.
Or make clothes properly.
Or sew in stitches smaller than a inch.

And WTH is going on with the rest of the clothes.
What the hell is the wierd bits of cloth sewn together corset dress/out about?! So you managed to cut the dress tabard piece. What's stopping them cutting it a bit bigger, instead of sewing 2 more side pieces on, in really big stitches?
And the stupid belted tunic, please.

Did all the washerwomen/men, good clothes dyers, all disapear with the dwemer or something?!

In fact, the entire world looks way too post apocolyptic and overdone.
You'd think a magic nuke barrage destroyed every clothes washer, cleaner, fireman, weaver, dyer, bedding maker, builder, in the place.

The beds are moronic. A straw matress and a small fur and no covers, yeah, right.
The only good, logical beds are the normal ones and bed rolls.

What, they can't weave now? Linen, hemp, cotton, wool, anything? At least weave linen or hemp or wool!

Buildings are destroyed, but never rebuilt. Fires ar'nt put out.

People live in forts, but don't clean them up or even put the furniture down in the right place.
There are caves that are cleaner and tidier than forts full of bandits and soldiers. Swept floors, everything put away.
And soldiers, of all people, would be forced to be clean, because militery discipline requires constantly clean places. If only to keep bored soldiers occupied.
Same for bandits, they'd at least clean up and put stuff away. If only to eat and live in a sanitery way.
Even the fort with a cleaner, Agnis, is dirty.

Whiterun looks like a ruin. Perfectly fixable walls, and they don't fix it? Not hard to get some builders or make guards do it. It's stones and wood, not hard!
Windhelms falling apart.
Solitudes one of the few places that looks normal and maintained.

These people should be further on than they are.They should at least be able to weave and dye and wash clothes!

That is...the first time I've seen a thread like this. o.O

Some of your points are valid. But others...ha.

It is a bit silly for a joint as snobby as Radiant Raiment to be selling pre-blemished clothing, but the dirt on everyone else's threads is to be expected considering the time period. Nirn's pretty much medieval, and in medieval times laundry was an entirely different affair than it is today. Soap was a rarity, for one. To get the filth out of the fabric, they'd dunk it in a river and beat it with a washing bat or scrub it over a ridged board. It definitely wasn't a weekly thing, either. Laundry took up precious time that was better devoted to chores, so they'd only have washing sessions every few weeks or even months. Even then, outer garments - the ones you see Skyrim's citizens wearing - weren't cleaned all that often. Usually they'd just hose down the inner garments, underwear and the like. Coloured clothing was washed even more rarely than plain linens since the harsh treatment faded the dye, and seeing as most of the outfits worn by the NPCs are dyed... you see what I'm getting at. The dirtiness is perfectly understandable.

But, magic? surely those wizards have a hidden secret only taught to the highest skilled mages in alteration magic? Skillbook: Dirts bane.

Perhaps, but most Nords are distrustful of magic and steer clear of it. (The mages' clothing does seem to be somewhat cleaner as a whole than that of the general populace, now that you mention it.)

True. Nords are backwoods hillbillies. But now that I think about my (fictional) skillbook might be classified as restoration magic, instead. Cleanliness is healthy, and restoration's all about health.

I simply do not understand this obsession that some folk appear to have with the fact that Skyrim and it's denizens and their clothes are dirty, and/or somewhat unkempt and/or in a rather tumbledown state.
They talk about it as if it's some major issue with the game.

What do you think a place like Skyrim would be like IRL?

If the clothes you bought in the nicer shops were all clean, eventually someone would complain that they've been wearing the same outfit while tramping through the wilderness and clearing out dungeons and OMG my clothes are still clean that is so unrealistic!

IMO the only way to please everyone would be to have clothes that start clean when you buy them and then get dirtier and dirtier as you wear them through your adventures. But that would be a whole lot of extra "stuff" for the game to keep track of and... I don't know, texture changes or something to handle the transition. And then you'd have someone complaining that their clean clothes got dirty and that's cool but now they have no Skyrim Laundry Service for getting them clean again.

So the simplest solution would be to have clothes start off a bit grubby anyway, since realistically if you wore them at all they would get grubby very quickly in that environment (yes, even in the "nicer" cities, that's the kind of world it is, people still poop in buckets fer cryin' out loud) and they would only be clean ONCE and that's when you first bought them and then only for a very short time. So realistically, most clothes are going to be grubby most of the time for the majority of the time that you have them so that was the option they went with.

@Xarathox: it's not the wizards you want to see for dirt and stain removal assistance. It's the Greybeards. Cuz no matter what kind of mess you've made of your clothes, they know how to... Shout it out.

I believe this is linked to the general fact that the whole world of Skyrim has been drawn in shades of grey and brown, and looks dreary and dull. I eventually found it intolerable enough to do the following:

For myself, I fixed this by unpacking all the textures, and writing a small piece of C++ code, that did the following:
- read all the color data from the dds texture files.
- undo Gamma correction
- Translate the colors from RGB space to luminocity + chrominance
- Double the value of the chrominance data, unless already high
- Back to RGB
- Reapply Gamma correction
- Reinsert into the dds texture files

This gave me my very own texture mod, that has much more realistic colors. Notably, clothing does not look washed out anymore, but is much more realistic and pleasing to the eye, as is almost everything else, and especially the natural environment.

Since I feel that those textures are still essentially a Bethesda asset, with only very minor changes in some textures, and no real creative input from me, I don't think I can make an actual mod of it, and because nearly all the textures have been changed to some extent, it would be a huge one at that. Also, my coding skills are really rudimentary, and the code I hacked together is totally not distributable.

Still, the idea is there for anybody else to use.

P.S.
Let me add that doubling chrominance sounds like a lot, and I originally thought that less would do, as I wanted realistic colors, not oversaturated ones. Still, that is a good indication of how bland the color space of Skyrim really is.

What should a country like Skyrim look like then?

I actually live in a country, that has a very long winter and lots of snow. Even if the snow can be white or grey, pine trees under the snow lose none of their green luster as they do in Skyrim. Various berries are brightly colored and not dull, as they are in Skyrim. Nature generally makes good use of color in whatever environment. Autumn leaves are still brightly colored despite the high latitudes.

This is essentially a case like what you see on film, when the makers wish to create a certain atmosphere by applying a totally unnatural color palette, when in fact the human eye in reality adapts to the general environment and you can see all the colors whatever the general lighting is.

Why on Earth Bethesda decided to make Skyrim appear unnaturally inhospitable is far beyond my understanding.

But it's not earth though, so who's to say it wouldn't look like that?
Also, from a stylistic point of view I guess they need to set the mood, remember you don't have as many different cues in a game as you do IRL...

To each his own I guess. I personally don't like spending time in an unnaturally bland environment, and making the colors a bit more realistic is really absolutely essential for me to care to spend any time with Skyrim. But I admit, that some people might find it "cool" or something.

"Cool" has got nothing to do with it, unless you mean from a saturation viewpoint.
But yes, it is to each his own, I don't find it bland, and you do, I find it immersive and you don't.
I would rather have it harsh and bleak and dark. In fact I use RL and ENBs specifically picked to make it even more so, in the areas where it's appropriate.
Vive la difference.

Interesting... any chance of a screenshot?

Well, I never took any comparisons, as I really don't have a mod to promote or anything.

Still, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75269066/ScreenShot.jpg is one screenshot I once took for the purpose of demonstrating ini settings needed to create very sharp shadows on my character (in the forefront).

If there really is a strong desire to see the effect, I guess I could take a couple of before/after shots.

No need, I was just curious as I'm big into visual tweaking pc games (my Minecraft looks like it runs on cryengine at this point lol).
That looks pretty good, quite a bit richer... those shadows are nice and crisp.

Well, it kind of stuck in my mind. so I did it any way. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75269066/ChromaDoubling.zip zip archive contains three pairs of comparison shots (with downsized resolutions). Not sure, if they would be the best examples, but they may help to get a feel for the sometimes more and sometimes less subtle effect.

P.S.
I don't normally use shadows like that. It was just a demonstration that it can be done (at the expense of shadows in the distance).

And I do well realize, that those comparison shots are most likely going to go to waste buried in this thread, especially as most people do seem to prefer the washed out colors or not mind them, but at least now I have them for future reference.

The colors and the dirt are fine with me. What I don't like is that the Nords don't seem to be very industrious these days. In the past they built those huge elaborate burial sites but now they can't be bothered to fix the streets in Windhelm or repair Whiterun after the war. Somewhere along the line the concept of public works projects was lost to the ages.

I know why. Just look at Fallout 3. It looks like the great war was 2 years ago, not 200yrs. That looks like the entire thing was washed indescriminately with a green and grey filter. You walk round and it's like you or the camera is wearing a green lensed gas mask or helmet. Everything is green or grey! I mean literally everything. You look at the seashore, then the water. It's the same colour. You look at a tree then a ruined building, it's the same colour nearly.

Bethesda are lazy and stupid when it comes to worlds. They don't get that places have to function properly and they're all diferent colours. They just wash the entire thing with a drab colour on every possible area.

With FO3, it's like they thought they had to SHOW radiation, something that is usually invisable. The world itself makes no sense. It would'nt be that trashed after 200yrs or have that much radiation.
Thats a post apoclyptic world that's wayyy overdone.

Skyrim is'nt even post apocolyptic, but it defiantly looks it.

People can make waterwheel log cutters, giant magical constructs, all kinds of things.
But they don't or can't put out fires, wash their clothes, dye cloth properly, clean houses, sew smaller than a inch, build, fix things, or weave bedlin a lot, despite being able to weave more complex clothes.
And they could build and fix in the past, clearly.

The first time I played, after a while, I looked at the world and thought, seriously, bethesda, you think firs are brown?
I know snowy and autumn landscapes and places are not all grey. There is colour there, always.
In the plants, the evergreen trees. There's always something.

It's a game. You have to pick one thing that makes most sense. It makes far more sense to make everything clean. Especially when you're selling them new from your high class shop!
Make a dirty or grimy version of things if nessesery. That works in Fallout. There's clean or dirty or grimy clothes. Pick what you want.
Have fine clothes, dirty fine clothes, or grimy fine clothes, clothes, dirty clothes, grimy clothes, etc. Everyones happy.
And don't say it'd be too hard. It would not in the least. They did it in FO3 and FONV with absolutely zero problems.

And why the hell would things be dirty in the first place? There would be lots of washerwomen in places, people would wash clothes themselves.
There would be people to send your clothes to, to be washed!
You could wash them with magic, never mind water!
Theres no reason for them to be dirty at all.

I have never scene a rpg were the makers were so stupid as to think, let's make almost all the clothes illogically dirty!
You either have a choice, as in FO3 or FONV, or it's clean and logical.

Close your eyes and click your heels together 3 times.

Really?

I disagree, in a world where most people's clothes are going to get dirty and be dirty most of the time, and be thoroughly clean only when first purchased and probably never again after that, I think it makes more sense and is more realistic to have them all be dirty anyway.

In other words, "dirty" is going to be the default state of clothes in the world in which your character lives. "Clean" is the exception, a rarity, an anomaly. Clothes in Skyrim-the-world are dirty by default, and so clothes in Skyrim-the-game are dirty by default. There's nothing illogical about that.

This.
Clean clothes would be the exception rather than the rule.