This reshade makes the game look so much better. It is by far on my top 3 list. Having said that, just like it says in the description, the brightness needs to be lowered. I turned it down all the way to 0 and it looks amazing. User abrb2011 already said what I wanted to say, so there is nothing that I could add, really.
Ya know, I've been around the Nexus modding scene for a very long time. Since I was 17, and I'm 34 now, so that's 17yrs on the scene now that I think back on it. To this day though, I still find it difficult to stop myself from at least checking out many of the ReShade presets available for any games I play.
Unfortunately, that habit has served mostly to expose an uncomfortable truth to me, and that truth is that 99% of ReShade presets are dogshit.
I have always been hesitant to want to be too critical of artistic expression, but after you've seen enough of any one thing, you usually start seeing the patterns emerge. And that's exactly what happened with ReShade presets for me.
I've been a firsthand witness to the climb in popularity and prevalence of the generic, low-effort ReShade presets we so often see crowd the mod databases these days. And believe me, I've perused and tried an innumerable quantity of them in that time.
The vast majority of these presets are clearly the result of people using ReShade in an attempt to compensate for poor display calibration/setup decisions, or heavy-handed over-correcting of the drawbacks and weaker aspects of low-quality and older display devices.
These presets almost always suffer from at least one but usually a combination of the following characteristics: wildly over-exposed/overly contrasty, darkened without preservation of detail, over-leveraged into adding or reducing one or more colors, far too sharp or far too soft, comes at the cost of an unnecessarily detrimental impact to performance to run, and the list honestly goes on.
To be fair to ReShade presets and their authors though; many of them are meant to fit certain well-known, oft-recreated preset "styles", generally synonymous with the use of certain plug-ins and effects. These types are usually associated with adjectives meant to convey a specific "feel", such as "high-fantasy" or "film-like", just like here you've used "Natural" to describe the style.
However, for any given game, there's also almost always at least a very select few presets which truly stand out and stand above the crowd to distinguish themselves as great.
These sort of presets almost always manage to improve image quality regardless of the system or display, and every once in a while are even so well done they can work just fine in SDR and HDR (though I will admit this last bit is truly rare).
And I think yours may just be one of this latter group of presets that truly kills it. I am genuinely impressed with this.
While I openly admit this opinion is strictly from the screenshots only, I've been around long enough and test presets extensively enough across enough games, that my first impressions based on screencaps are almost always dead on.
And going off of memory, I think your preset is definitely one of the best - if not THE best - I've seen for AFOP so far.
It seems to straddle that oh-so-thin line between being subtle enough to still capture the original artistic intent of the devs, while still transforming the image quality substantially enough to be a clear and prominent overall improvement.
I like this enough that I'm going to download and test it out. This may sound like I'm just acting high and mighty, but I don't intend it to be this way. It's just the highest compliment I can really give to a ReShade preset, as I almost never bother to install and test them anymore. Especially since I now play primarily on an HDR OLED display. This means that to test the quality of a ReShade preset, I generally have to go to the effort of switching things up to temporarily run in SDR, and so I have to be pretty motivated to bother with all that.
So yeah, you had asked for feedback, so I figured I'd give some. This is very impressive work, and I think you should be proud of what you've accomplished.
Hi! Just curious. I have an HDR OLED monitor as well, but I'm not super knowledgeable on the usage of ReShade presets with/without HDR. Is there anything I'd need to do to make sure my game still looks good, when using this ReShade preset, with my HDR OLED monitor? Or would I need to disable HDR? Sorry for the stupid question haha. Thanks!
Thanks for taking time to leave your feedback. Really appreciate your opinion. I think you're 100% right. I just like to improve my experience with my games. I like to make the graphics as close to real life as possible. So, I'm just uploading it here for others with similar tastes to enjoy. Unfortunately, I don't have an OLED monitor to test my presets on, so it may look a little bit off on some high contrast screens like OLED TVs and monitors. If you experience any major problem with the preset, it would be great if you could report it to me. Thank you.
7 comments
If you face any issue feel free to ask.
Thank you for this great reshade.
Unfortunately, that habit has served mostly to expose an uncomfortable truth to me, and that truth is that 99% of ReShade presets are dogshit.
I have always been hesitant to want to be too critical of artistic expression, but after you've seen enough of any one thing, you usually
start seeing the patterns emerge. And that's exactly what happened with ReShade presets for me.
I've been a firsthand witness to the climb in popularity and prevalence of the generic, low-effort ReShade presets we so often see crowd the mod databases these days. And believe me, I've perused and tried an innumerable quantity of them in that time.
The vast majority of these presets are clearly the result of people using ReShade in an attempt to compensate for poor display calibration/setup decisions, or heavy-handed over-correcting of the drawbacks and weaker aspects of low-quality and older display devices.
These presets almost always suffer from at least one but usually a combination of the following characteristics: wildly over-exposed/overly contrasty, darkened without preservation of detail, over-leveraged into adding or reducing one or more colors, far too sharp or far too soft, comes at the cost of an unnecessarily detrimental impact to performance to run, and the list honestly goes on.
To be fair to ReShade presets and their authors though; many of them are meant to fit certain well-known, oft-recreated preset "styles", generally synonymous with the use of certain plug-ins and effects. These types are usually associated with adjectives meant to convey a specific "feel", such as "high-fantasy" or "film-like", just like here you've used "Natural" to describe the style.
However, for any given game, there's also almost always at least a very select few presets which truly stand out and stand above the crowd to distinguish themselves as great.
These sort of presets almost always manage to improve image quality regardless of the system or display, and every once in a while are even so well done they can work just fine in SDR and HDR (though I will admit this last bit is truly rare).
And I think yours may just be one of this latter group of presets that truly kills it. I am genuinely impressed with this.
While I openly admit this opinion is strictly from the screenshots only, I've been around long enough and test presets extensively enough across enough games, that my first impressions based on screencaps are almost always dead on.
And going off of memory, I think your preset is definitely one of the best - if not THE best - I've seen for AFOP so far.
It seems to straddle that oh-so-thin line between being subtle enough to still capture the original artistic intent of the devs, while still transforming the image quality substantially enough to be a clear and prominent overall improvement.
I like this enough that I'm going to download and test it out. This may sound like I'm just acting high and mighty, but I don't intend it to be this way. It's just the highest compliment I can really give to a ReShade preset, as I almost never bother to install and test them anymore. Especially since I now play primarily on an HDR OLED display. This means that to test the quality of a ReShade preset, I generally have to go to the effort of switching things up to temporarily run in SDR, and so I have to be pretty motivated to bother with all that.
So yeah, you had asked for feedback, so I figured I'd give some. This is very impressive work, and I think you should be proud of what you've accomplished.
I just like to improve my experience with my games. I like to make the graphics as close to real life as possible. So, I'm just uploading it here for others with similar tastes to enjoy.
Unfortunately, I don't have an OLED monitor to test my presets on, so it may look a little bit off on some high contrast screens like OLED TVs and monitors. If you experience any major problem with the preset, it would be great if you could report it to me. Thank you.