Little Tip: If you want to know something specific about the ENB use "STRG + F" to quickly search the entire modpage.
ENBEFFECT.FX
This file is kind of the backbone of the ENB pipeline. Most shader outputs (bloom, lens and adaption for example) get mixed into the final scene here. Furthermore, things like tonemapping or HDR color grading controls can be found here.
Extended Bloom Mixing
As I said, bloom gets mixed into the final image right here. You can quickly tweak the bloom before it gets mixed into the scene without having to go to the bloom shader itself.
AGIS - Apply Game Imagespace
Imagespaces (IS) and their modifiers are Skyrims built in method of color correction. They get mostly (but not exclusively) used by weather mods and the night eye.
These IS's get ignored by the ENB normally, but they can be added back into the final image. Thats what AGIS does!
The added control over the maximum (and sometimes minimum) value of the IS lets the ENB apply most important changes to it while not going out of bounds when some modifier alters it too heavily.
This makes any kind of night eye fix completely obsolete and saves you from fiddling around with (sometimes flawed) implementations of it.
HDR Color Grading
This section should be the most important one in here for most users. You can change the overall exposure (i.e. brightness), contrast and saturation of the scene before the colors get tonemapped. Meaning that you won't have to deal with as much overexpsoure or hue shifting in your highlights like you would normally have to, if you increase the brightness or contrast in the postpass (or even photoshop) later.
Tonemapper
One of the more important steps in the rendering pipeline. This preset uses the Uncharted 2 tonemapper to enable full UI control over the tonemapping curve.
What even is tonemapping you ask? Short, simplified answer: Tonemapping "compresses" the HDR (High Dynamic Range) data to usable LDR (Limited Dynamic Range) data that can be correctly reproduced/interpreted by your monitor.
The Tonemapper itself should only be changed very carefully, because its a bit tricky to tweak and can mess up the entire image pretty quick if you increase/decrease the wrong value(s)!
Dithering
And the last section in this shader file. Dithering. SH uses a custom blue noise based dithering shader to reduce the overall visibilty of the added noise. It has some other neat features like a gaussian like distribution and a few different movement systems which helps against pattern building.
ENBEFFECTPOSTPASS.FX
A bunch of post processing effects, additional Antialiasing and a powerful color grading suite.
Color Grading Suite and LUTs
With the introduction of the 6.0 update, all normal color grading operations (including external LUTs) are computed right here. This change provided a few benefits like more complex color manipulation tools but also better performance.
Lets start with the LUT system first which has received a few changes and is now part of this suite.
It has two UI parameters in addition to the dropdown menu. The first one is called External LUT Weight and controls the overall impact that the loaded LUT has on the scene.
Talking about external LUTs, the default ones have been divided into different categories:
- Base - Almost neutral LUT
- Kitsune Cut - Default look of the ENB
- Season - Variations of the default LUT that loosely represent the mood of different seasons
- Eccentric - Stylized with some relatively heavy Color Correction
- Calm - Desaturated and low contrast
- LoFi - Cinematic like look with a compressed color range
The other new option, LUT Dithering Amount, is used to add optional dithering to the scene if needed. This is related the whole color grading shader and not just external LUTs tho. Using heavy color grading settings can cause banding in some scenarios because of the optimizations I added to the new shader. This won't be a problem most of the time, but if it ever occurs just remember that you can use this parameter to obscure it.
Alright, lets get to to the main part of the color grading suite now. Its divided into three different sections that correspond to the different methods they use to manipulate the image.
- The first ones are general settings that get applied to the whole image like you probably already guessed. As I said in the HDR color grading section above, you should avoid the brightness and contrast parameters here if you can. The rest should be pretty self explanatory tho.
- The second section features tweaks for specific luma zones (aka. shadow, midtones and highlights). You can also tweak how much those zones should overlap, near the top of the UI.
- And the last section is dedicated to hue separated color manipulation. Those parameters should also be pretty self explanatory.
Spoiler:
Show
General color grading - Luma zones separated tweaks - Hue separated tweaks
Antialiasing
You can see the enabled AA options right here, depending on the preset you've chosen in the global options. The different AA options were already explained on the main modpage which should be everything you need to know.
Sharpen
SH uses a custom advanced scalable unsharp mask shader. It has plenty of parameters you can mess with to get the desired result, including a depth fade that removes sharpening from distant objects, contrast awareness and even object edge removal.
Monochroma
Another custom SH shader. This one has two main features: a colorfilter aka hueseperator and an extended black and white filter.
Colorfilter:
The Hueseperator works by desaturating any color that is not in the specified filtering range (which is a combination of the selected color
and the filtering range).
Tip: Switching to the HSL widget instead of the RGB one in the color picker should make color selection a lot easier
You can also control the saturation of the filtered and non-filtered area and tweak the hardness of the filter.
Black and White Filter:
The Black and White filter can be used to well... desaturate everything.
The nice things is, you can control how the shader does its job by changing the weighting of each color channel. You can even add back a bit of tint afterwards to get something like a sepia effect.
Vignette
Vignette shader with different blending modes, extensive UI controls and an easy to use visualization tool.
Chromatic Aberration
A lightweight CA shader with a healthy dose of tweakable UI parameters. Invert the direction of the distortion, limit the CA to brighter areas of the image with the high pass filter or simply change the intensity/curve of the effect.
Letterbox / Pillarbox
The infamous black bars, better known as letterbox.
This version of the letterbox shader has a few (maybe helpful) tiny additions however: You can switch between two different input modes and it supports translucency through the alpha channel of the color picker.
ENBDEPTHOFFIELD.FX
This file is a heavily modified and overhauled version of Marty McFly's Advanced Depth of Field that includes a bunch of useful additions for part and full time screenarchers, a complete UI redesign and even improved performance.
Focus
I included three different focusing modes with individual settings to enable fast switching between gameplay and screenshot modes.
Autofocus: Default mode that automatically focuses the middle of the screen. Great for gameplay!
Mousefocus: Left click somewhere on the screen to switch the focus to that point. Easy and fast focusing for screenshots.
Manual Focus: Enables full customizability of the focusing distance. For everyone that wants 100% focus control.
Depth of Field
This section defines the area that should be blurred by the DoF (aka. the Circle of Confusion).
Near blur curve: Controls the blur between the camera and the focus plane.
Near Blur Bleeding: How much the foreground blur should bleed over the edge.
Far blur curve: Controls the blur of everything behind the focus plane.
Hyperfocal depth distance: Ok, this one is a bit tricky to describe with words only. It's basically the range at which the DoF effect stops to work. The higher the value the farther away that range will be. Low values are usually better for gameplay and higher ones better for screenshots.
Remove FPS Objects: Tells the DoF to exclude first person weapons from bluring
Blur render res mult: This option should only be increased above 0.5 if you really need the highest quality DoF. It will eat your framerate and only increase the overall bokeh quality by a little bit.
Gaussian Postblur Width and Quality: Alters the strength and quality of the additional gaussian blur that gets added after the bokeh effect.
Bokeh
To bokeh or not to bokeh, thats the question.
Intensity: Increases the intensity of the bokeh effect.
Curve: Scales the bokeh intensity with the maximum shape brightness.
Shape Max Size: How big the individual bokeh shapes are allowed to be.
Shape Vertices: Changes the overall shape of the bokeh effect.
Shape Quality: Controls the quality (sample rate) of the individual bokeh shapes.
Shape Roundness: Increase this option to create round bokeh shapes and decrease it to do the exact opposite.
Shape Rotation: Changes the rotation of the shapes.
Shape Aspect Ratio: Controls the "stretching" of the bokeh effect.
Shape Weight: Change the weighting of the bokeh shapes - creates a kind of "donut effect".
Cut Shape in Half: Does what it says. Cuts half of the bokeh shape away.
Additional Effects
Spherical aberration, diffraction, optical vignette, chromatic aberration and graining can be adjusted here. If you don't know what those effects do play with the parameters. They are based on real life effects that can be seen in bokeh, so look up those things if you want to know exactly what they are.
Stylized Bokeh Shapes
This feature can be used to create custom bokeh shapes out of greyscale images. You have to enable it through the global options file by setting ENABLE_STYLIZED_BOKEHSHAPES to 1. After that you will see a new UI section in your DoF UI. The controls there should be self explanatory if you're a bit familiar with the other DoF parameters.
To add your own shape masks go to "enbseries/Textures" and edit the BokehMaskAtlas. It uses a 3x3 grid for the shape textures. The bottom row consists of placeholders that you can easily replace with your own images.
DoF Color Grading
The DoF color grading works only in the CoC area (out of focus area).
The mask parameter changes the area that the grading should be applied to and the rest are just normal color grading tools.
If you want to know where the keying feature went, it got removed from the DoF shader. You can use the new photo studio addon to create a similar effect.
ENBBLOOM.FX
A powerful, fully dynamic and optimized HDR bloom shader.
Prepass
You can control the input to the main bloom passes here. It includes thresholds to limit the bloom to the brighter parts of the scene combined with some basic color grading controls.
Bloom
This section is responsible for the main bloom passes. The bloom shader uses a realtime gaussian kernel instead of a precomputed one to give you more flexibilty on how the bloom effect should look like. This also means that the performance cost of the bloom scales with the choosen sigma value (i.e. the width of the filter).
If you enabled depth testing through the global options you can also manipulate the parameters here based on the distance to the camera.
Bloom Mix
The final destination of all previously computed bloom textures.
You can control the intensity of all the different passes as well as if they should be normalized here.
Additional features that can be enabled through the global options include:
Source Masking: Subtracts the bloom source of the prepass from the final bloom texture so it only outputs the "raw" bloom.
Dirt Reflections: This is basically just a fancy mirrored lens-like reflection of the selected dirt texture in combination with certain bloom outputs. (The optional lens dirt inside of ReShades Ambient Lighting shader is probably the closest comparable effect)
ENBLENS.FX
Thats the part for all the JJ Abrams and Michael Bays. Enjoy the lens flare mayhem!
Lens Feature-Set
This should provide a little overview of all the features inside the lens shader. You can toggle all effects on or off right here or by using the technique dropdown menu at the top (depending on the lens flare type).
Weather Effects
Most UI parameters should be self explanatory, so I won't write a huge description for those effects.
Btw: The rain droplet shader uses external textures that can be edited easily if you know how to work with normal maps and texture atlases.
The rain effect simulates random droplets of rain that hit the lens and are slowly drifting downwards.
The only features that isn't enabled by default is the distortion features. If you want to use it, enable it through the global options file.
Next up is the frost effect. This effect will form a layer of ice crystals (beginning at the screen corners) during heavier snowy weathers like snow storms.
Anamorphic Flare
Those are the wide horizontal lens flares. Bethesda already included some form of them in the base game, but they couldn't be controlled enough to be even remotely usable. So I made my own version that didn't suck!
The core values influence the brighter, inner part of the flare and how hard the falloff should be while the width controls how wide each flare should be (keep in mind that wider flares cost more performance). I also included a additional saturation control and the option to rotate the flares.
Lens Reflections
This is the default lens effect from the ENB example file with a bunch of tweaks to increase its customizablity and performance.
Chromatic Aberration
Adds CA to all lens flares and the lens dirt without affecting the whole scene like the postpass CA does.
Lens Dirt
Renders a dirt texture on top of bright objects. You can choose between four different ones from within the game.
Starburst Flare
The starburst flare is the one that creates... well the star like pattern around bright objects. The lens settings should match the one for the multi-iris flare if you're going to use both simultaneously.
Ghosts Settings
This effect is used to create a bunch of little ghost flares from light sources. The first section is used to define the overall property of the lens/aperture and the overall shape of the individual flares. Every category below the first one that is named "Flares #" is responsible for all of the little ghosts that make up the entire lens flare.
ENBEFFECTPREPASS.FX
The prepass has been reworked completely by now and features a custom sun ray system (DSRS) and SSS customizer.
The main shader in here is the DSRS (Dual Sun Ray System). A fusion of two different kinds of sun rays: direct sun rays and distant volumetric rays.
Note: When I talk about binary sun rays, I simply refer to the sun ray shader that is directly integrated into the ENB binaries (i.e. the one that can be changed in your enbseries.ini or the left side of the UI).
The "Distant Volumetric Rays" add godrays to the sky and distant terrain. "Direct Sun Rays" on the other hand work quiet similar to the sun rays that can already be found in the binary. Sounds like they are completely redundant then, right?
Thats where the main strength of the new system comes into play: It doesn't cost any additional performance! Combine that with the already low cost of the shader to begin with and you're left with an effect that is almost free by default.
But be warned, the DVR shader is still considered very experimental and underlies screen space limitations like most other post processing shaders. This simply means, that everything outside of the screen is unknown to the shader (which leads to visual glitches sometimes).
One last thing - As I've already mentioned above, the direct sun ray effect of the DSRS is similar to type 3 or 4 binary sun rays. I already configured and added those rays to the weather system, meaning you can switch between both ray types without any issues (don't forget to save and apply your changes after enabling the binary rays!).
The next effect is the SSS customizer. This one gives you more control over objects with subsurface scattering (most importantly skins) and lets you apply a bunch of different color correction settings to them.
ENBEFFECTUNDERWATER.FX
This underwater shader features a few distortion/blur types that trigger when you go underwater and replaces the rather static vanilla blur.
The first effect is a depth blur: Dynamically blurs the underwater environment based on the distance to the camera. Its also animated and features a fix for edge bleeding that doesn't cut out objects too harshly.
Two distortion shaders are also available for you to choose from. The lens distortion adds either a barrel or pincushion distortion to the entire screen. Maybe not the most realistic thing, but it can give underwater scenes a neat little touch imo.
The last shader adds animated wave distortion to the scene that increases based on depth data, which adds a bit of movement to the stiff underwater environment.
ADDONS
To get SHs addons working, simply copy them into your root directory. Its pretty much the same process that you followed when installing the ENB itself.
They will be detected and added to the respective shader file automatically, depending on their name (i.e. the prefix of their .fxh file).
Note: Don't install addons you don't need! Prepass addons for example can create a huge performance impact even when not used because of the HDR nature of most prepass shaders! Remove the ones you don't need currently and reinstall them later - your UI settings won't be removed.
Stylization Suite 2.0
This is the new and improved version of the Stylization Suite. It's still meant to provide a few more exotic filters and effects for screenarchers, but is now separated into the prepass and postpass shaders. This allows them to have higher quality and more customization options while still performing better than the old one did.
Prepass:
Only the outlines can still be found here. Their edge detection algorithm has been replaced with a better, dynamic one that can be scaled seamlessly through the UI. Two new features have been added as well: coloring and a z-buffer fix (this one tries to ignore "holes" in the depth texture - works great for some scenes but could cause problems in others). The z-buffer fix is always active, you can simply toggle between the more agressive and more conservative versions in the UI.
Postpass:
The place of the new painting and quantization filter. The painting filter is now dynamic as well and works differently under the hood. You can also add custom outlines to the final output to give it a different painting style (those outlines are not the same as the prepass ones!). The quantization filter still works relatively similar to its old counterpart, with the exception of one new addition - a color filter. You can add colors to the different luma zones that the quantization shader produces. This can create some really artistic or straight up weird results depending on what you do with it.
Custom Overlays
This shader doesn't do anything on its own, but allows you to load pretty much every image you want as an overlay into the game. Doesn't matter if you want to add a film-scratch texture, screen guide, random magazine covers or just reference images for scuplting characters in Racemenu. This shader can be used for pretty much anything that involves static images. It scales your images automatically to your screen size (if you want) and lets you adjust everything ingame afterwards as well. Rotation, offset, scalings, border color and even additional blending modes if the default alpha blending isn't enough.
To add your images to the overlay list you have to copy them into the overlay folder first (can be found here: enseries/Textures/Overlays). Next, go into the .fxh file of the addon and replace the generic filenames with the one from your files. This is it. Now you can go ingame and choose your overlay.
Particle Field
Spawns particle sprites on a two dimensional plane in front of the camera. You can choose from a wide variety of different options to control the properties and flow of the particles on that plane. Fade, size, rotation, randomness, tickrate (or manual time selection), depth of the particle plane, flow direction/type, particle origin point and different particle textures and colors. The particles are drawn prior to the lens and DoF shaders which should allow for some interesting interactions between those three effects (e.g. using the particles as a portable lens flare generator or using them to add some additional lights to your background). The particle textures are very similar to the bokeh mask textures and can be changed very easily with most image editing software. The only difference is that it uses all three color channels and the alpha channel instead of just accepting greyscale images like the bokeh shapes.
Blur Suite
You can enable this optional fully dynamic blur shader through the global options file instead of installing it like the other addons. It features 4 different gaussian based blur types that can be applied to the whole scene, as a vignette or via depth based controls.
This suite is mainly aimed at screenarchers, but you can tone down the effect and use it for normal gameplay as well. A few examples of what sorts of effects can be achieved to your game/screenshots with this shader:
- High quality radial blur or a vignette blur
- Illusion of motion by blurring on a specific axis (can also be combined with depth controls to cut out objects in focus)
- Or simply add a slight blur to your entire screen to soften the image if the default look of Silent Horizons is too sharp/clear for your taste
Photo Studio
This new addon aims to provide a portable background for your screenshots, so imagine it like a real time greenscreen. But thats not all! Because the backdrop is added in the prepass already, things like DoF, bloom or lens flares (and the entire color grading shaders) are added onto it as if it was actually inside of your game.
Another neat features is the quick HDR approximation and color grading for the background to really kickstart things like the bloom and DoF.
And if that wasn't enough, you can also add a simple directional light to fake rim light from the new background for example.
You have to provide the backgrounds yourself, similar to custom LUTs or the overlay addon. Simply copy them into the new "Textures/Backgrounds" folder and add their names to the list that can be found at the top of the photo studio .fxh file. If you don't want to add images, you can also choose a flat color for the entire background in the UI.
Real Time Snow Cover
This addon tries to fake a slight snow build up effect on surfaces during snowy weathers. Its a highly experimental shader right now and isn't recommended to be used during normal gameplay as it has far too many bugs with transparent objects (water for example) and view transformations. Its mainly a proof of concept and is only really useful for screenshots.
GLOBAL OPTIONS
The global options can be used to manipulated some underlying features of the different shaders without needing any HLSL coding knowledge.
You just use some kind of text editor (Notepad++ would be ideal) to open those two files and your good to go.
Tip: If you want easier editing you can enable the built in C# syntax highlighting of Notepad++ (all grey lines are comments and all purple things are global options then)
ENBGLOBALS.FXH
This file is the main "options-hub" of the preset and includes the most important internal shader settings.
Lens: Add additional features to the weather effects and change some lens flare settings.
Bloom: You can enable some additional stuff here like a dirt reflections or depth testing.
PostPass: Choose your preferred antialiasing preset here and change the quality preset for SMAA and FXAA. You can also enable the optional blur suite.
Depth of Field: Enable/Disable the optical vignette, chromatic aberration, the focusing tool or stylized bokeh shapes.
ENBLUT.FXH
Thats the file for all of you LUT-Nuts out there.
Note: If you want to know how to make custom LUTs, look into the LUT tutorial thats included in the download.
The simplified LUT technique you see here can be used to bind most standard 3D LUTs into the ENB and features automatic size detection.
Copy your custom LUTs into the included folder (enbseries/Textures/LUTs/Custom) and follow the instructions to bind in your own LUT files.
The options near the top of file are just there to enable the RevoLUTion support (requires the RevoLUTion addon to work correctly) and the custom LUT techniques.
WEATHER CONFIGS
The weather section isn't for newer users! Weather specific tweaking should only be done by more experience users!
Multi Weather Support:
Or short MWS, enables the use of different enbseries configuration files for different weathers. This unlocks more consistent lighting between different weathers, as well as weather specific effects (like aurora borealis illumination at night, more reflective surfaces during rainy weather, better volumetric lighting integration and simply more realistic lighting in general). I seperate the way of implementation into two different types for better understanding:
Basic (BMWS)
This is the default way to do MWS and is used by most ENB presets with the exception of some Oldrim ones. Every type of weather (Clear, Cloudy, Rain, Snow, etc) gets its own config with this method. - Its good enough most of the time, but depends heavily on the weather mod and the changes that the ENB preset applies.
Extended (EMWS)
This version on the other hand adds unique configs for EVERY SINGLE weather. Its far more time consuming to set up (obviously) but gives the ENB much more flexibility to make weathers more consistent and/or varied.
MWS types of the different presets:
The one for Obsidian Weathers uses a complete EMWS while all other presets use some form of BMWS.
Tweaking
If you tried to tweak some of the enbseries parameters, you probably realized that certain UI section won't react to your tweaks like they normaly do. Thats the work of the multi weather system that those preset utilize.
Each of the enbseries UI section has a "IgnoreWeatherSystem" toggle thats set to true by default. Setting this to false enables the use of weather specific values for this particular section of the UI.
Next up is the weather window. This window shows you important info on the current weather and config file that is in use. After you click the load button you should be able to tweak each parameter.
Keep an eye out for weather changes tho! If your current and outgoing weather aren't the same you should wait for the transition to be completed before tweaking. Also, all changes will be discarded when the transition to a new weather starts, so make sure to safe them a bit more frequently!
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