http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:ENB

This is my personal vanilla-style ENB that was tuned to my mods/system/display that I am releasing by request of the community. V1.2 is coming soon with many improvements!  Leave feedback or issues in the Posts section and PLEASE READ THE DESCRIPTION / FAQ! <3

Color, contrast, sharpness effects are done in SweetFX and will not show in screenshots unless they are taken with the SweetFX hotkey!  This may be why your screenshots look different when compared to mine.  This goes for video as well, and is why I am moving color processing completely into ENB from SweetFX in an upcoming version.




BEFORE/AFTER EXAMPLES (via imgur) -- CLICK HERE FOR MEGA-GALLERY.

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Straylight ENB (BETA)

Here it is!  Many people have been asking me to upload this for several months, and I finally decided to do so.  PLEASE READ the description and FAQ, as I will not be answering any questions that are already contained here!

Straylight ENB is my personal ENB preset that I built from the ground-up over the summer using the flat defaults that come with ENBSeries, with the goal of improving light, color, and shadow, while retaining vanilla looks and styling.  It started as simply a "shadow fixes only" ENB and grew and grew from there.  The emphasis here is subtle quality and practicality.  I activated and worked on each effect one-by-one, and refined them until it was as close as possible to what I wanted.  I do a lot of photography, video, and design, and knew what I wanted to see on screen.

This is NOT a super dramatic, cinematic, or fantasy preset.  There are lots of amazing ENBs that do this, and I'm not trying to compete or convince you why you should try mine.  If this isn't your thing, that's totally fine, but please just move along and don't leave a useless or snarky comment! <3

This was created on a system running a core i7 3930k 3.2ghz, 32GB RAM, and an GeForce GTX 680, and retained fairly high performance (40-50fps outside, 60fps inside.)  Further processing was added when I upgraded to a GTX 980 and OC'd my processor to 4.1ghz, resulting in the ULTRA version (50-60fps outside, 60fps inside.)

FEATURES:

- Primary focus on light, shadow, and color balance
- Highly-detailed ambient occlusion for detailed depth
- Works great with weather mods (Pure Weathers, CoT, etc.)
- Realistic ambient lighting: fine-tuned for day/night, both in and outdoors (slightly brighter days inside)
- Bright days, dark nights -- works best with the optional darker nights patch in the downloads section
- Warm, humanistic subsurface scattering for skin
- Rich dawn and dusk colors; you'll want to sit on a rock and watch the sunsets!
- Intelligent, high-performance depth-of-field. Is not "always on", only activates when close to people or objects (shader code by Matso+Indigo Neko)
- SweetFX proxy DLL for additional anti-aliasing, color balance, and sharpening (optional vignette)
- Warm and cold tones emphasized, overall less "green haze" than vanilla
- Two versions, high (GTX 680) and ultra (GTX 980)
- Utilizes nearly all ENB effects, and ENB object processing, but uses vanilla post-processing (added performance and retains vanilla-like looks)

INSTALLATION:

- FOLLOW THE S.T.E.P. ENB INSTALL GUIDE TO GET THE BASE ENGINE INSTALLED AND CONFIGURED!  If this step is not followed 100% closely, nothing will work! Find it here: http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:ENB
- Download and extract the contents of this preset to your Skyrim folder, and let it overwrite any files it asks.  You will need to tweak the ENBLocal settings to match your hardware/memory.  Again, see the S.T.E.P. install guide!
- To get some extra performance, I recommend dropping your shadow resolution 2048 in your INIs. I know, everyone wants 8000px shadows, but trust me, ENB helps a lot and that change will net you several FPS.
- I highly recommend downloading one of the darker nights patches in the optional files. This ENB was optimized for VERY dark nights, and as such the sky and fog colors may look weird if you're using vanilla vanilla night brightness.

THINGS TO NOTE:

- Built on ENBSeries v0.262 but will work fine on more recent versions (let me know if you experience issues)
- The DoF acts like a real eye/camera, so looking at yourself in 3rd person can be difficult without becoming blurred yourself, since the crosshair will generally be trained on something over your shoulder in the distance.  Might be weird if you're used DoF that puts the PC in a "focus bubble".
- Turning on full ENB post-processing will wash out the image, as it is not configured for this.  Leave Original Post-Processing enabled!  This is something that Boris has stated is not "officially" supported, but there are no issues and it is how this ENB achieves its looks.
- In some interiors, when using ELFX, looking at a character at very low FOV (i.e. 30, as with Face to Face Conversations) their skin will bronze/darken.  This is due to the tight ambient occlusion settings I am using, and am looking into why only certain lights do this and chatting with folks on ENBDev forums.  Ambient Occlusion is a very important part of this ENB so it is not recommended to disable!
- The DoF in this preset calculates distances and focus points based for first person by default. Going into 3rd person makes the camera focus on your character, so if you prefer to play in third person, edit enbeffectprepass.fx and look for "#define USE_FOCUS_FIRST". Put two slashes in front of it to comment it out, and remove the two slashes in front of "#define USE_FOCUS_THIRD". I have not fully tested settings using third person so use at your own risk!.

FUTURE FEATURES:
- Per-weather settings (hard at work on this for my own game!)
- Additional ENB post-processing and color-tuning
- Configuration for JawZ' Enhanced Lighting for ENB (ELE)
- Some tracking on the DoF to make it easier to look at yourself straight-on in 3rd person (has come up a lot already!)

FAQ:

Q: How can I make my game look exactly like your screenshots?
A: I have put countless hours into fine-tuning everything in my game, including making many of my own weathers, and textures, so that might be tough, but  here is an article with all of my most-important visual mods!

Q: How will this perform on my system?
A: There is literally no way to know unless you just try it! ENB are easy to add/remove, so try it out! :) I made it on a GTX 680 then beefed up a little once I got a GTX 980.

Q: Will you be adding weather support?
A: YES!  Much like each effect, I am working on this very carefully to ensure fully detailed implementation.

Q: Is this safe to install/remove?
A: Yes, ENB presets don't do anything to saved games or anything else, so it is 100% safe to add and remove at-will.

Q: How do I change darkness level at night?
A: Edit the ENVIRONMENT > AMBIENT LIGHTING AMOUNT NIGHT and DIRECT LIGHTING AMOUNT NIGHT settings, as well as the SKY > INTENSITY NIGHT settings to adjust sky color

CREDITS:
- ENBSeries engine by the amazing genius Boris Vorontsov
- SweetFX by the great CeeJay
- Depth-of-field shader code by Matso, modified by Indigo Neko
- All further configuration and color tuning by me

I put a crazy amount of time and effort into this, and while I realize most ENBs are mostly configuration settings, I feel that my preset is unique, and ask that you please do not copy just my ENB preset, tweak one thing, and release it as your own, at least without giving me credit!  Thank you!