Albedo
Base colour without lighting
Also known as: Base color · Diffuse · BaseColor
Definition
Albedo is the base colour of a surface in a PBR workflow, representing the surface's pure pigment with no baked-in lighting, shadows, or reflections. A correct albedo map looks flat and even — almost dull on its own — because all lighting comes from the engine at render time. Baking light into albedo (a common beginner mistake) double-shades the material when the scene's own lights hit it.
In production
Real-world albedo values fall within a constrained range: pure white is around 0.95 (90% reflectance), pure black around 0.04 (4%). Substance Painter's Material Information widget flags values outside this range as physically implausible, since almost nothing in nature reflects more than 90% or absorbs more than 96% of incoming light. Skin, foliage, and fabric albedo references are commonly pulled from calibrated charts like the "Physically Based Rendering" chart bundled with Substance. A frequent production bug is authoring albedo from a photo without removing baked shadows first — photogrammetry captures ambient occlusion and directional lighting directly into the pixel data, so delighting passes (manual in Photoshop, or automated via Substance Sampler's "Delighter" filter) are required before the map can be reused as pure albedo. Skipping delighting produces a "double-shadowed" look under the engine's own lights, most visible on rotating props or day-night cycles where the baked shadow direction never matches the scene's.
