Xilandro wrote:MonarchX wrote:
there isn't a single custom ENB preset that "improves" image quality, depth, and/or contrast in some places without ruining detail in other places
It simply isn't possible to make such ENB presets work everywhere because its post-processing, not actual graphical assets.
First I thought to write looong long message, with lots of examples, good ways to gather required info on photography, how to make very useful palettes and LUTs, and use them in Photoshop\Gimp to get best results, even with crappy F4 ingame lighting. But reading again through your replies I see - you don't care. You have your own opinion and you won't listen. Take care and good luck with your realistic preset.
You haven't denied what I said about every color-changing or majorly custom preset ruining detail in many places, making overly dark places pitch-black. I mean if you just change a bit here and there, then it could be fine, but a bit here and there won't change the image drastically.
I am not trying to preach display calibration, but I do want to explain how I came to conclusion that games look better with basic ENB presets rather than fully customized/edited presets. I used i1Display Pro (also known as i1D3) colorimeter, which I profiled with i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, and used the software that could provide the most accurate software-level calibration, ArgyllCMS 1.8.3 + dispcalGUI, to create a 4096 x 64 3DLUT for ReShade that applied both - grayscale and colorspace correction, unlike ICC profiles that can only apply grayscale ("vcgt") to games, often requiring LUT enforcement tools, like CPKeeper, and / or Borderless Window tools, like Windowed Borderless Gaming or FullScreenizer. After proper and accurate calibration and application of 4096 x 64 3DLUT through ReShade, vanilla Fallout 4 graphics with base LUT's (same as disabling Original Color Filter in ENB AFAIK) began looking miles better than before. Skin tones, water, sky, and other aspects actually had life-like colors. I mean all it takes is a slightly different hue of red to make skin tones look off and end up with an overall unrealistic-looking skin. I doubt most ENB Preset makers even bother with proper display calibration and yet judge games' graphics based on the image THEY see, not likely the graphics mod users see on their un-calibrated monitors, and not likely the graphics creators saw when they developed their game on calibrated monitors, like most AAA game development studios do.
You do know that graphics developers select specific colors, hues, saturation, luminance, and etc. for a specific reason, right? Realism is often that reason. Some ENB preset developers do calibrate their screens, but most don't do it right. I think most of them use simple ICC profiles / 1DLUT's, crappy software (like packages from DataColor or X-Rite), and inaccurate probes (like Spyder probes, which have accuracy below minimum requirement). Others actually think their IPS monitors come fully pre-calibrated (no such thing!) because the specs brochure said so or they just download ICC profiles from the internet, which is likely to actually worsen their display's accuracy instead of improving it (because each individual display unit is different and needs its own specific settings and calibration). There are those who use just a single good colorimeter, like ColorMunki Display and/or i1Display Pro, both of which use the same hardware and provide excellent accuracy, often do not utilize spectrophotometers, such as i1Pro / ColorMunki Photo / i1Pro 2, to get that near-reference level image accuracy, although those 2 colorimeters I mentioned can provide near-reference level of accuracy on their own on displays that fit the display-type presets those colorimeters are programmed with. Generally speaking, when it comes to true enthusiast image editing, one needs to have a pro-level IPS monitor with enough OSD controls (at least 10-step grayscale, and hue + saturation colorspace) for a full calibration without any need for 1DLUT's or 3DLUT's or anything software-related at all.
In summary: Unless you have an accurately calibrated display (NOT with Spyder 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 probes!), you cannot judge my screenshots because the image you see is not the image I see.
Many ENB presets in Skyrim and GTA V either ruin near-0-level black detail OR made blacks appear as gray (especially with Adaptation) that resulted in much lower contrast ratio, one equivalent of IPS monitors or so it seemed. I want to utilize my monitor's static contrast ratio (4960:1) - all 0-255 levels must be active and not a single one clipped.
Typical example: Let's assume a custom ENB Preset, titled "Darky", can make one image (in some location titled "X") with light or medium grays for shadows to look much deeper and give it more contrast if those light-gray shadows were much darker. OK, it can surely be done by reducing black level below 0, can't it?! At some point we will come across a place in the game where vanilla graphics actually uses very dark gray shades for shadows. If we were to use "Darky" ENB Preset that improved contrast in location "X" by reducing black levels below 0, then we would not see details of that shadow because it would completely clipped instead of using several grayscale levels like it was supposed to with vanilla graphics. This kind of stuff happens with almost every heavily-edited ENB. You can't make one location look good without sacrificing the image in another. Only vanilla ENB preset (or one very slightly modified) can provide an acceptably good image in all locations.
As far as custom LUT's go:
Even complex custom 3DLUT's affect too many things. A 3DLUT cannot affect something specific, like skin tones or blue sky, without affecting everything else in the game that uses the same color tone as skin tones or the same tone as blue sky. 1DLUT is even worse because all it can do is affect grayscale levels, which encompasses all the color hue and saturation levels (
1000's of shades!!!) at that grayscale level.
You can deny it all you want, but there is undeniable merit to everything I said.
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