I figured I should probably post a topic here for some small updates and an explanation of what I've added. The goal of this preset is to look 'movie-realistic' without filters. I don't want to mess with individual colour balances, add thick colour toning, or do too much post-processing.
enbeffect.fx
- Bloom is done in an "energy-preserving" way. When the intensity of bloom is increased, the image does not become brighter - which is both more realistic, and fixes many problems where scenes will appear too bright or dark.
This is especially important for Fallout 4, because it looks like Bethesda's artists tried to follow the principles of "PBR" - but the default shaders don't care. So the problems with the Institute elevator and various bright objects pop up when we add our own proper bloom on with additive blending.
Because of this, it's feasible to reduce the bloom intensity to a value like 0.01 and still get nice glare from bright objects. No adjustment in the bloom shader necessary. In practise the value is set a bit higher to make the lighting look less flat. - Dirty lens effect is done using the bloom texture in a way that doesn't add extra brightness, but instead makes the lens effect stronger.
- You can apply a "neutral density" filter based on the bloom texture which equalises contrast between (for example) bright skies and dark shadows by altering the adaptation result.
- Eye adaptation/exposure is done with kingeric1992's histogram system, because it worked out a lot better than the other things I tried doing.
The previous methods use the original game variables to set some carefully fudged parameters. - Film grain is done before tonemapping to give the illusion of extra detail.
One thing I noticed about other film grain implementations is that they looked a bit weird when it came to bright or dark places, because they worked like an overlay. By doing it before tonemapping, it gives a better feeling of almost being able to see dark objects, and works a bit like noise added to renders to simulate camera sensor imperfections. - Tonemapping doesn't use the vanilla "Uncharted 2" algorithm. The vanilla one is apparently tuned to produce a really bland image, for Bethesda's artists to tune it through photoshopping a LUT later.
Instead, it uses a tonemapping shader developed by someone who worked on the older "filmic tonemapping" algorithm. It has a nice contrast between sharp bright colours and deep dark tones. - You can switch between tonemapping algorithms with different techniques.
- Allows the game's colour correction to work. This allows the tints and fades set in the game imagespace parameters to function. In practise these are used far less in Fallout 4 than the other games, but they're still useful.
- Uses an efficient gaussian filter based on work done by smarter people than me.
There are no adjustments made to the image for the reasons listed above - and it's useful to just have a blurry everything texture. (But for something like Skyrim SE where the lighting is flat, not too good.)
- Splits the default file into separate pieces to add different blur methods with the same focusing parameters.
- Adds a method based on Light DoF. It has a nice bokeh shape with good performance. It uses a random factor to modify the sampling offsets - because of Fallout 4's temporal AA, this gets smoothed out into looking like a higher sample count.
- Adds a method based on Aiyen's depth of field, Ring DoF. Works as above.
- The current version is a bit broken.
- A port of the popular LumaSharpen, which enhances edges and small details. In Fallout 4, the TAA works to enhance the quality of the effect. It's clamped at a low strength by default to avoid ringing artefacts.
- kingeric1992's SMAA port. This is made to be used with TAA on top. Redundant? Not really. In the case of Fallout 4, the temporal filter is seemingly only mixing the results of previous frames together for temporal supersampling. Having SMAA underneath antialiases edges that aren't covered in the radius of the jittering. It also antialiases edges in motion when the game has no data to reconstruct them. There is no extraneous blurring because the TAA preserves details well.
- Lens CA. This chromatic aberration effect works close to an actual lens.
- A vignette effect.
- 3D colour lookup table. Nothing fancy.
- Some other colour toning/screenshot tools people asked for.