Realistic reshade preset for 3.3

How dare you guys criticize something that's free and work in progress?

Hahahaha, I'm just kidding, keep em coming guys. Any suggestion or criticism is welcomed by me.
In the second screenshot color banding is from image compression as "krautbernd" pointed out, the purpose was to make the sun brighter and space around it darker.

I will update the first post with more screenshots as I make more progress using your suggestions.
 
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Will you be sharing how you did it?

I'll be making a guide in the first post after tweaking more and making sure it looks consistent all across the galaxy, that's why I'm out exploring right now.
So the hardest part is making sure that no place gets overexposed/underexposed, so constant tweaking is still needed.

If you want to try out the first version, link is in first post at the bottom. All you need is latest reshade installed and these effects also:
FakeHDR, AdaptiveSharpen, AmbientLight and Clarity

Right now I disabled some of those effects and added other third party shaders which work and look better.
 
With Reshade the bad anti-aliasing becomes more noticeable.

If sharpening is overused then yes.

I didn;t know that the latest version of reshade works. I quit trying after 1.1 which is the version I am still using. Versions 2.x and later never worked for me. Win10x64 here.
I like your effort put into this OP. I stopped trying to achieve better results after some version of ED Horizons 2.2 - 2.3. Now I am content with what I have achieved which is not much different from yours. Probably needs re-tweaking but I can't be bothered anymore... I think the greatest problem with vanilla is the lack of sharpness and now with the new lighting is even more evident - its more fuzzy now. But too much sharpness and you got into bad anti-aliasing issues.. I tend to think of Reshade as the equivalent of make-up for a beautiful woman: too much of it and she becomes uglier rather then more beautiful.
Well done and keep up the good work.
 
With Reshade the bad anti-aliasing becomes more noticeable.

I think the greatest problem with vanilla is the lack of sharpness and now with the new lighting is even more evident - its more fuzzy now. But too much sharpness and you got into bad anti-aliasing issues..


I understand what you guys mean, but I'm pretty sure you're talking about the blockiness of textures rather then edge anti-alias.

If you look here the edges are smooth. No effect from sharpening.
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But ground textures.... are another story. In vanilla, textures look more blurry/foggy, which helps to mask the blockiness, however sharpness removes that and makes textures look more crisp which makes the blockiness a lot more noticeable, especially when viewed from up close. In the distance, sharpness has a clear advantage.

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There's nothing we can do to fix this blockiness, all we can hope for is that Frontier makes higher quality textures in the future.

In normal gameplay it's not noticeable, unless you're trying to find ants on the ground.
 
A while back, someone posted a ReShade preset in the ReShade forums that uses a sort of hybrid TAA. It uses motion blur to get color information from previous frames and then it applies FXAA. It does this 3 times, and adds a small amount of sharpening, which actually helps in games that has awful aliasing.

However it will affect performance a lot.
 
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looking forward to the final result, the new colours are "better" but reshade does a waaaay better job and was using it up until this update.
 
Try it out at the science station at the witchhead nebula. That is a black and white system. Very surprisingly black and white.
 
I would be interested in trying your preset. It looks very good. The link in the OP doesn't work, can you re-upload it?

Hi, I'm really sorry you couldn't download the preset, I haven't played at all since december of last year. I'm pretty sure, it was misconfigured though, because I used old custom GraphicsConfig.xml from 3.2 on 3.3 version of the game.
I suspect that was the reason I had the washed out look on my game. As soon as I start playing again, I'm going to update the preset and also make a small tutorial on how to install it. I will try to finish it before the end of this month.
 
I've always been running reshade.

- Bloom creates terrible effects in 3.3 and must be turned off.
- I used to run lumasharpen but have also turned that off.. it eats into the new fog effects in the station and everything looks better without.

The main thing i use it for is desaturation.. just doing it the dumb way with vibrance at -0.13 (this will depend on the color balance of your monitor). I also have curves and lift gamma gain on i think take the edge of the cartoony colors.

There's not much change apart from saturation from my preset but i still can't live without it.

To the op: it sounds like what you want to do is horrible.

- Play with curves and other contast levels to get blacker.. but really don't do this because you lose detail.
- More vibrance is easy can can be done in the tonemap or vibrance sections, but why would want to increase this? Other people are silly. It looks like cartoon with hi vibrance. Not voltron. Elite is more cuthulu unknown horror like.
- Getting rid of warm colors if your monitor is warm or that is your taste is done in lift gamma gain.. in the mids and highs subtract the red and add blues and greens. Its all art at this point though and im guessing you're used to how it works.
 
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To the op: it sounds like what you want to do is horrible.

- Play with curves and other contast levels to get blacker.. but really don't do this because you lose detail.
- More vibrance is easy can can be done in the tonemap or vibrance sections, but why would want to increase this? Other people are silly. It looks like cartoon with hi vibrance. Not voltron. Elite is more cuthulu unknown horror like.
- Getting rid of warm colors if your monitor is warm or that is your taste is done in lift gamma gain.. in the mids and highs subtract the red and add blues and greens. Its all art at this point though and im guessing you're used to how it works.

Thanks for sharing your opinion, luckily for me, I'm no longer used to how the game looks with reshade, since I haven't played it for a while. I think that helps my eyes to readjust to the default game and work from there.

Regarding the vibrancy setting, vibrance is used to boost already washed colors and does not saturate already vibrant colors. It's true, I like the game more colorful in certain areas but also less colorful in others.
It's quite difficult to balance this because of the constant changing in lighting and environments. Darker looking galaxy background is my top priority.

Preference isn't up for discussion I think, people have different tastes, that's the beauty of Reshade afterall, to give people more choice and control.
I personally like a more natural look over gloomy or desaturated ones. I also take lots of screenshots, if you mute the amazing colors of space, what's the point? ;)
 
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