Visit the GitHub page for more changelogs and documentation.
Six months, a new monitor and a 3090 later, I finally had some time to really look back and my code and fix a lot of the issues that were bugging me. I set some time aside to clean things up, thoroughly test the code and most importantly: make sure it looks good. The new screenshots will hopefully prove just that. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Changes (2.2):
Fixed major clipping issues from HSL saturation calculations, along with various other bug fixes
Added "Normalization" slider to adjust degree of luma normalization
Added "Component Average" luma coefficients (they suck, but they're there in case you want to experiment)
Removed "Shadow Boost" feature for lack of utility
Increased "Tuning Boost" slider range to 20
Tested and verified to work up to HDR400
Modified default preset
Updated documentation & tooltips
Changes (2.2.1):
Modified default preset to address possible magenta bias, as well as shadow desaturation and white levels
If you find any shortcoming in the default parameters in relation to CP2077, feel free to post your preferred settings so I can see what people's general preferences are. My to-do list includes creating a hue-based desaturation mode such that only hues close to the specified detinting color are desaturated, protecting the color in dark areas lit by colors such as red or blue.
been testing this in other games. Like Dark Light [ steam or gog client ] And its not too bad. but still sometimes causes artifacts, like one color overshoots another, and thus creating rim effects without a smooth transition from light dark or colors.
Artifacting may occur with more aggressive settings since the color precision coming from the input image (game) can be limited. If you are using more than one color correction shader, try and place it right at the start of the effect chain, or try using less aggressive detinting settings.
Just tried it, it works very well for Vanilla - a pretty easy solution to implement if someone doesn't want to mess around with mods and LUTs and all the rest of it. It actually feels like you're using one of the better LUTs like Nova or Realcolorr 3. I think for someone who is okay with modding, a LUT is going to be less computationally expensive (please correct me if I'm wrong), but this is very well done as a simple one-stop-shop solution to smarten up the Vanilla visuals .
The only downside is the bright magenta/purple-ish tint to the UI reds, but that sort of thing goes with Reshade territory (you could pair it with a UI masker maybe, like Alexander's Effects Shade Toggler (basically with that, as I understand it, you can filter out and toggle off whatever shader is used in the UI layer - there's a version in a mod for BG3 on Nexus that works very well for BG3, but I guess the equivalent "address" would have to be found for this game to make it work).
Thank you, glad you found it useful. I could look into some kind of UI masking feature if it doesn't involve diving too deep into the engine as that's mostly outside of my ability. I'll try and look into it.
Edit: The shader itself shouldn't be computationally expensive at all considering it's just doing a bit of light math. I tried my best to make sure the code is as optimized as I can make it. Between this and a LUT I'd be surprised if someone can feel a performance difference. That kind of impact would come from more intensive ReShade effects like bloom or advanced sharpening filters.
Would you know how to make DeTintX an Nvidia freestyle effect ? Can't use reshade using dlsstweaks as dxgi but your filter is really great and it could work if applied through GFE.
Have you tried this method? I am not familiar with NVidia freestyle so I have not had the chance to play with it, but this post suggests that ReShade shaders may be compatible. Let me know if it works.
I had hopes and tried it but unsuccessfully so, absolutely nothing showed up in the overlay. Hence my asking. I've since stopped using dlsstweaks but in the meantime, the dlssgtofsr3fg mod came out and reShade messes it up anyway. That's too bad as your newest update pictures look amazingly good.
Then I'll see if I can give Freestyle a try and work something out. I also haven't had any issues running ReShade together dlssgtofsr3, so I don't know what kind of issue you're experiencing.
Well, gave it all another shot and I feel as dumb as sorry.. don't know what I messed up on my own or what weird thing had happened a couple months ago between reshade, dlssgtofsr3 mod versions and who knows what but I basically had a weird 9 different looking zones showing up at some point whilst giving DeTintX a try without dlsstweaks and wrongly assumed it was reshade but reading nukem's github issues and changelogs (which I should have done back then), it might just have been a leftover dev file...
So, as I was saying, I gave it all another shot and it all works indeed, no performance impact that I could feel nor measure and no weirdness with the FG mod.
However, I have to agree with theCyanideX, there's definitely a big magenta bias in 2.2 that previous versions didn't exhibit as much. My best experience overall with your shader was back on CP 1.63 using DeTintX 2.01, really felt almost perfectly balanced (I prefer the vanilla look in the menus but that's just me, in gameplay it was perfect imo)
Anyway, sorry again for asking in the first place and even if it would be cool, please don't bother going that route if you don't feel like it.
Glad you got it working. The magenta bias that I couldn't notice seems to have come from a change in the internal workings as the detinting parameters themselves are completely the same. I'll have a look and modify the default preset.
That's weird because the detinting values are the same as in previous versions. I'll take a look and try to recalibrate, the change in the code might have affected something but the parameters themselves are the same (0.035, 0.060, 0.000)
Not sure if you're playing Baldur's Gate 3 right now, but I've been using this shader for it to remove the green tint and it works great. Might want to upload it to BG3 Nexus, maybe?
Thank you. I don't exactly play BG3 but if the demand is high within the community, I may upload it there. My only trouble would be getting screenshots for the game. Otherwise, you can let people in the community know about the mod and link them to the GitHub page. If you or anyone else in the BG3 community wants to get in touch about the mod, contact me on Discord @strung.
I haven't tried the latest version with Shadow Boost yet, but if visibility in dark areas is a problem maybe recommend people to use an Eye Adaption shader for ReShade to help with that? I've used that for other games.
EDIT: Having tested it out the Shadow Boost effect actually works quite well.
It's meant to improve some of the low-mid shadows while maintaining black levels (provided black levels are configured properly) since the boost is a multiplication of the brightness value, not direct addition. Glad to hear it's working well. As I noted in the stickied post, disabling it is always an option if you want higher contrast.
In my opinion, given the ugly LUT the devs insist on giving us since launch (with the exception of the cinematic exr lut which worked for about a year) I would say this shader is one of the best ways to restore proper grays and closer to natural color that we have. It dos not solve the very high clipping in colors present in the shipping LUT as that is an information lost already which cannot be restored in the reshade postprocess but man it makes the game with RT OD and 3B2R mod an awesome experience. My highest appreciation and thanks for this great shader/work! BTW I tested this in HDR on a calibrated 77" LG OLED, works flawlessly!
Woah, thank you! I'm happy to see it works well on a mighty 77" OLED, let alone on RT OD. I don't quite have the setup to fully appreciate either of those things (yet!).
And yes, since this is a post-process step I really can't do much about information that's lost during the game's render. Maybe one day I or someone else will figure it out.
Hi, now that we established just how essential this shader is :), is it perhaps possible to update it with better granularity in the tuning mode for the RGB 0-100 levels, like instead of units of 1 to have units of .5? I find I would need this on my calibrated OLED to hit an even better neutral gray. Or is this something I could change myself by editing the shader in reshade? Many thanks once again for this great idea of shader!!
Made a few changes, and here's what I found. The ReShade UI on its own doesn't allow the user to make adjustments finer than 0.001 for floating point values. However, I added a "mix" slider to the detinting controls, which theoretically should allow for finer adjustments since all the maths under the hood is still occuring at a higher level of accuracy than the UI values.
So, in theory, one can a low mix value with proportionally higher RGB values for finer tuning. e.g. rgb(0.01,0.02,0.00) @ 100% mix == rgb(0.10,0.20,0.00) @ 10% mix
I didn't have a ton of time to test stuff super accurately, and I don't know if I even could, considering the limitations of my monitor (and eyes), so do let me know if this change actually does allow for finer tuning.
Edit: Increased the granularity even further by increasing the range of the color values from 0-1 to 0-100, still with 3 decimal places. Again, I have no idea if ReShade will even allow for these finer changes to show, but it's worth a try.
I have tested last night and can confirm it allows for finer tuning within the limits of my eyes as well, however please note I have tested v 1.3 and only when I finished I noticed you uploaded v 1.3.1. Worth noting is that the finer control is necessary in my opinion as it can provide better grayscale tuning however as you probably know already the differences vs the initial approach are in the diminishing returns realms but for perfectionists and or people with good calibrated displays is a must. Also, the shadow desaturation feature seems to play a very important role in the picture naturalness, I am still playing with it noticing you improved how it is now being handled in the latest shader versions. I am settled at 142 with 0.975 mix currently as these are the thresholds I noticed some green creeping back in the grays but I am still not entirely sure if this is how it should be set. I will be testing later the 1.3.1. Thanks again for your work.
v1.3.1 increases the range for the RGB sliders, so there should be no need to use the mix value for anything other than fading the effect in and out. As for the changes to shadow desaturation, here is the difference between the old and new method:
The way I would suggest setting these values is finding for yourself at which value you think areas darker should be completely desaturated, and at which values they should remain unaffected (default values are 0.01 - 0.30). Anything between those two values will be desaturated gradually as they get darker. This effect is a bit more up to personal preference and how much you want to encroach on midtones can determine how bleak you want your game to look. The linear method is simply more intuitive for users (and marginally cheaper on calculations) and should not have much visual impact, unless it does, in which case I can add another linearity slider to allow users to curve the slope up or down, but I do not see the need for it at this moment.
I tested v 1.3.1 but sadly I could not find suitable values in tuning mode for the RGB, so I went back to v 1.3 which works fine for me. Thanks for the shadow desaturation tips, I somehow still find myself playing with the range with not much satisfaction yet tbh. That is possibly due to the fact that closer to black but not just near black the color conversion may not be possible in an ideal way as green carries most of the luminance and with less green in those levels the picture even with preserve luminance at 100% is kinda pushing blue a little, potentially having too much luminance in blue I think. Also, some finer gradations near black seem a bit lost compared with vanilla, not sure if anything can be done for more precision near black.
Noted - will probably revert changes to the sliders when I get around to a new version Unfortunately that's simply the limitations of post-processing, the whole image is sitting on a bed of green so approximating those finer changes in luminance and stretching them out to darker values creates its own set of problems. For those cases, I would recommend using other shaders such as qUINT deband after this one to improve shadow banding or some other type of color correction to improve contrast. I'll still see if there is a more mathematical way to go about this, since this method is still just a somewhat clever approximation of real color. Either way, thank you for the feedback - it's been pretty instrumental in helping me refine the shader. I'll be away for a bit but once I'm back I'll pick this project back up and do some more research. Regardless, I'm pretty happy with how it is now and it's pretty adequate for me and probably most people.
42 comments
Six months, a new monitor and a 3090 later, I finally had some time to really look back and my code and fix a lot of the issues that were bugging me. I set some time aside to clean things up, thoroughly test the code and most importantly: make sure it looks good. The new screenshots will hopefully prove just that. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Changes (2.2):
Changes (2.2.1):
If you find any shortcoming in the default parameters in relation to CP2077, feel free to post your preferred settings so I can see what people's general preferences are. My to-do list includes creating a hue-based desaturation mode such that only hues close to the specified detinting color are desaturated, protecting the color in dark areas lit by colors such as red or blue.
And its not too bad. but still sometimes causes artifacts, like one color overshoots another, and thus creating rim effects without a smooth transition from light dark or colors.
But overall its good. How did u make this ?
Artifacting may occur with more aggressive settings since the color precision coming from the input image (game) can be limited. If you are using more than one color correction shader, try and place it right at the start of the effect chain, or try using less aggressive detinting settings.
Either that or open up any .fx file of any shader in a text editor like Notepad++ and reverse engineer things until you get a hang of it.
theres a lot of info there.
The colors are washed out.
The only downside is the bright magenta/purple-ish tint to the UI reds, but that sort of thing goes with Reshade territory (you could pair it with a UI masker maybe, like Alexander's Effects Shade Toggler (basically with that, as I understand it, you can filter out and toggle off whatever shader is used in the UI layer - there's a version in a mod for BG3 on Nexus that works very well for BG3, but I guess the equivalent "address" would have to be found for this game to make it work).
Amazing bit of work!
Edit: The shader itself shouldn't be computationally expensive at all considering it's just doing a bit of light math. I tried my best to make sure the code is as optimized as I can make it. Between this and a LUT I'd be surprised if someone can feel a performance difference. That kind of impact would come from more intensive ReShade effects like bloom or advanced sharpening filters.
Can't use reshade using dlsstweaks as dxgi but your filter is really great and it could work if applied through GFE.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/igv2ci/comment/g2w430s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I've since stopped using dlsstweaks but in the meantime, the dlssgtofsr3fg mod came out and reShade messes it up anyway.
That's too bad as your newest update pictures look amazingly good.
So, as I was saying, I gave it all another shot and it all works indeed, no performance impact that I could feel nor measure and no weirdness with the FG mod.
However, I have to agree with theCyanideX, there's definitely a big magenta bias in 2.2 that previous versions didn't exhibit as much.
My best experience overall with your shader was back on CP 1.63 using DeTintX 2.01, really felt almost perfectly balanced (I prefer the vanilla look in the menus but that's just me, in gameplay it was perfect imo)
Anyway, sorry again for asking in the first place and even if it would be cool, please don't bother going that route if you don't feel like it.
In any case, thanks for you great work!
EDIT: Having tested it out the Shadow Boost effect actually works quite well.
And yes, since this is a post-process step I really can't do much about information that's lost during the game's render. Maybe one day I or someone else will figure it out.
The ReShade UI on its own doesn't allow the user to make adjustments finer than 0.001 for floating point values. However, I added a "mix" slider to the detinting controls, which theoretically should allow for finer adjustments since all the maths under the hood is still occuring at a higher level of accuracy than the UI values.
So, in theory, one can a low mix value with proportionally higher RGB values for finer tuning.
e.g. rgb(0.01,0.02,0.00) @ 100% mix == rgb(0.10,0.20,0.00) @ 10% mix
I didn't have a ton of time to test stuff super accurately, and I don't know if I even could, considering the limitations of my monitor (and eyes), so do let me know if this change actually does allow for finer tuning.
Edit: Increased the granularity even further by increasing the range of the color values from 0-1 to 0-100, still with 3 decimal places. Again, I have no idea if ReShade will even allow for these finer changes to show, but it's worth a try.
As for the changes to shadow desaturation, here is the difference between the old and new method:
The way I would suggest setting these values is finding for yourself at which value you think areas darker should be completely desaturated, and at which values they should remain unaffected (default values are 0.01 - 0.30). Anything between those two values will be desaturated gradually as they get darker. This effect is a bit more up to personal preference and how much you want to encroach on midtones can determine how bleak you want your game to look. The linear method is simply more intuitive for users (and marginally cheaper on calculations) and should not have much visual impact, unless it does, in which case I can add another linearity slider to allow users to curve the slope up or down, but I do not see the need for it at this moment.
Unfortunately that's simply the limitations of post-processing, the whole image is sitting on a bed of green so approximating those finer changes in luminance and stretching them out to darker values creates its own set of problems. For those cases, I would recommend using other shaders such as qUINT deband after this one to improve shadow banding or some other type of color correction to improve contrast. I'll still see if there is a more mathematical way to go about this, since this method is still just a somewhat clever approximation of real color.
Either way, thank you for the feedback - it's been pretty instrumental in helping me refine the shader. I'll be away for a bit but once I'm back I'll pick this project back up and do some more research. Regardless, I'm pretty happy with how it is now and it's pretty adequate for me and probably most people.