making visuals 'pop'

[Bluegunk]

2 general 'realistic skyrim videos'.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YBxLbvWdfUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVyqnCtKnM

 

and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YBxLbvWdfU

OK, I'm not going into the merits of texture packs, parallax and stuff.  I use a good rig and card with HDR, ENB, DLSS, etc on the go.

 

BUT...

 

How do these guys make their images 'pop'?  Sharpness? Lighting adjustments?

 

Curious if anyone has any hints.  Thanks!

[traison]

I'd say contrast and brightness turned up to 11 will do that.

 

Also I'm not sure what the status is on de-desaturating, de-blooming and de-bluring Skyrim SE/AE is. Back when Skyrim SE released I was staying put on Skyrim LE trying to figure out if the new "visual enhancements" of SE could be disabled or if they were hardcoded into the then rumoured new engine. Once I figured out it could be done with simple ESP record edits I got SE and it was the first mod I made: A pascal script for xEdit to go through all image space modifiers (and what not) to remove desaturation, bloom and blur. The result was a clear, vibrant and beautiful picture on top of which to build.

 

Whether anyone has made and published such a mod I do not know. The ENB mods I've tried, and the one I'm using, have all been made with wild and exaggerated color adjustment values; hinting at the fact that the majority of players are running on those imho disgusting "modern" graphics that shipped with SE. It is only after I adjust these presets that I get the advertized image quality.

 

Another hint that people are, again imho, doing it wrong is that I don't think there's an actual darker nights mod yet (granted I haven't looked in 5 years). The ones I've found have all had the sunglasses effect. The sunglasses effect means that they achieve darker nights by applying a black overlay at night. This dims all light sources, as if you were wearing sunglasses, hence the name. You can guess what the 2nd mod I made for Skyrim SE was: A pascal script for xEdit that dims sun (moon) and ambient lights during the night. This makes nights darker, but allows lightsources to remain bright.

 

My point is, I imagine you can get better results if you do not: 1) first desaturate, blur and bloom the image to hell, then try to pull it back with an ENB and 2) do not dim light sources with artificial overlays.

Edited September 21, 2024 by traison

[Bluegunk]

Thank you! I've tinkered with ENBs for ages. I find a lot of them oversaturated with too much contrast.  But I've never been able to make the image have that 'presence' that some videos seem to achieve. 

 

I'll try your ideas. Cheers!

[traison]

You may also want to consider a full suite of CS instead of ENB. Some of the things they do there are far better, some worse. Personally I've been wanting that proper lighting effect that CS provides to replace ENB's screenspace lights. I'd tell you what the problem is, but its one of those things that if you haven't spotted it yet its better if you don't as when you do you can't unsee it and it will ruin your week.

 

I realize this was not part of your original query, but have a look at the distant details in those videos. I mean it could be YouTubes compression, but my distant graphics are far sharper and better, despite me not having an image that bright. Balgruufs face was smeared with oil, same with the bow on the wall behind Farengar. Faces of distant npcs are blurry. I get the feeling these kinds of graphics being showcased here are very specific - a very specific time of day, a specific weather, perhaps even altered worldspaces for perfect lighting angles and intensities. Like setting up a scene for a movie in real life. Photoshopped, if you know what I mean, or it could be literally that - video editing effects added afterwards.

[Bluegunk]

56 minutes ago, traison said:

I get the feeling these kinds of graphics being showcased here are very specific - a very specific time of day, a specific weather

 

That's for sure. I also play Cyberpunk and it is common practice for the realist YouTubers to set the game weather to plain, grey overcast. The softer lighting is perfect for Ray and Path Tracing and makes reflections look excellent - particularly around the cars. I do spot these things in the Skyrim ones, too. I haven't paid much attention to distance, I'll look out for that.  I think one of the things is clarity and sharpness stand out for me. But the trouble is, too much of both and image deteriorates in my game. I wonder howe they get the definition so good.

 

I have to ask, what is CS, please?  Community Shaders?  I know the set but I'm not 100% sure I want to go that route - if that's the CS you are talking about.

[Grey Cloud]

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

I also play Cyberpunk

Me too and I use a LUT (Nova LUT 2), Natural California Lighting Mod and 2k texture packs.

 

 

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

Community Shaders?

Indeedy. Highly recommended with a Reshade preset.

 

2 hours ago, Bluegunk said:

I haven't paid much attention to distance

I always turn off DOF.

 

There are settings for your GPU for altering sharpness (at least for AMD).

[traison]

The reason I haven't switched to CS is pretty much that it seems to have issues with shader compilation. I know about the cache thing, and I know about incompatible mods causing infinite loading, but still, that startup time of like 4 minutes is not something I can do as a modder. I restart Skyrim like a thousand times a day, have done so for the past 10 years. I'd run out of minutes, and patience. Yes I know I could turn it off while doing stupid stuff, bu I wanna my pwetty gwapics while testing too.

 

Also if edge sharpness is something you're looking for, keep in mind that there's several implementations of AA. Some of which are not available, depending on which camp you're in: team red, or team blue. There's differences in these, not only in performance. Generally I turn AA off, I'm old school, I like my pixels, but I think for Skyrim I may actually have some AA enabled from team blue.

 

Edit: Maybe I exaggerate a bit, but you know what I mean.

Edited September 21, 2024 by traison

[Bluegunk]

I use SMAA when I can but the most I otherwise use is a bit of FXAA from the Nvidia console.  4 minute start up? No thanks. My 2 mins is bad enough!

 

Thanks, Grey Cloud and Traison. Good stuff for me to go on. Cheers!

[traison]

Reviving an old thread, I know, but I figured this may be worth posting. I had a sniff around the Community Shaders camp, and now I'm a bit confused about whats going on.

 

My understanding of CS was that it was/is essentially a shader replacer. Perhaps it extends rendering capabilities as well. Like ENB essentially - shader replacing and rendering fixes in a box. I was interested when I saw that it would be doing actual lighting effects, not screenspace lights like ENB, and that there was a plugin to remove the light limit in the works.

 

Now I had another look, but it seems things have changed in the past year. CS on its own will not produce the effect we see in the OP. In fact the difference is so minor I lost track of whether it was on or not when I was toggling it to figure out what (if anything) was even changing. Maybe it has something to do with the changes I've made to Skyrim that I mentioned previously in this thread - my Skyrim is already less blurry and more colorful on its own. I figured there would be a plugin to add the effects I was after, as this seems to be the structure of the CS mods: modularity. I found screenspace shadows, among other things. What happened to CS having actual lights? Why do we need the light limit fix, if we're casting shadows in postprocessing?

 

Anyhow, I kept looking and found Amethyst Reshade which based on the screenshots seems to produce the effect seen in the OP. It claims to use CS and KreatE, however the download is split into 2 parts: one using ReShade and the other using KreatE. So based on the requirements here, I'd need 2 shader replacers (CS and ReShade), and a mod which dynamically changes weather colors (KreatE) to get screenspace (and blurry) shadows and brighter sunlight. The ReShade files are actually for ReShade as well, so unless ReShade itself uses or requires CS (seems unlikely considering ReShade is standalone) I don't even see why CS would be a requirement.

 

I realize I might have misunderstood something in the past, or maybe I'm missing something now, but as I see it the CS deal is looking like a mess of sub-par results compared to what ENB was doing back in Skyrim LE.

 

On a more positive note, shader caching in CS seems to work now. No more 4 minute compile times on every start.

 

Anyone want to call me stupid?

[BattDaPsycho]

21 minutes ago, traison said:

Anyone want to call me stupid?

No, now I just want pictures. My ELFX + Skyrim 202x downscale combo looks good but since I read this whole thread I'm invested now.

[traison]

Right, had another go at ReShade after working around the installer it comes with. My security principles do not really allow applications like that, so it was a bit of work to DIY basically.

 

Community Shaders-86492-1-1-5-1734468631

Vanilla HDR-76521-1-1-1-1665265181

Wetness Effects-112739-2-0-0-1733538076

Grass Collision-87816-2-0-0-1733538004

 

ReShade 6.3.3

All effects (shaders) included

Amethyst - Reshade-99450-1-2-1711215285

 

Initial impressions are:

• Textures look smeared and plastic.
• Volumetric light is turned up to 11.
• Nights are very bright, and keep in mind that this is with my already significantly darker nights mod.
• Screenspace effects are even more obvious here than they were in ENB. For instance, when using an ENB I didn't get things like HUD elements glowing, but here they do. ENB probably does its drawing before the HUD, and ReShade does it after.

So Amethyst ReShade is not the preset used in the OP's examples, however its quite likely ReShade is what that is based on.

 

I think the thing to do next is to confirm this by going through these "next gen" Skyrim graphics videos on youtube and see if any of them show HUD elements. Screenshot that event and see if bright colors from the hud elements (like white text or a bright red health bar) bleeds onto the game world behind it. If it does I would at this point make the assumption that it is ReShade and then its just a matter of finding or making the preset.

 

Edit: and if one of them happens to show the main menu, look for a flash. If the image flashes, it's ReShade.

 

Also I'm aware that the volumetric light and bright nights could be because I'm not using the weather mod that Amethyst was made for, but that wasn't really the point here anyways - this is not a mod review.

Edited February 25, 2025 by traison

[traison]

Decided to stick with CS, after figuring out how it functions. Also, to answer the question originally posted in the OP:

 

What you're seeing there in that video is either a fully decked out CS+ReShade or Rudy ENB, NAT, Lux (and co.) and all the high-res textures and PBR. So most likely Skyrim 202X, ParallaxGen, xLODGen, DynDOLOD and all the mesh and texture enhancements you can get from the Nexus. I would not expect any kind of decent performance with a setup like that, unless you dump 2000-4000 USD on your graphics card(s); even then it seems unlikely something like that would run at even 1080p without DLSS and framegen.

 

Back to CS then, since I need to amend some of my previous statments. Relevant load order for starters:

Spoiler

Community Shaders-86492-1-1-15-1738001422
Wetness Effects-112739-2-0-0-1733538076
Grass Collision-87816-2-0-0-1733538004
Light Limit Fix-99548-2-0-1-1733596917
Screen Space Shadows-93209-1-2-1-1737068709
Skylighting-139352-1-0-1-1737227592
Terrain Shadows-135817-1-0-0-1733602194
Terrain Shadows - Heightmaps-135817-1-0-0-1733598206
Water Effects-112762-1-0-0-1733538121
Water Blending-95145-1-1-0-1699907425
Cloud Shadows-139185-1-1-1-1737068749
Grass Lighting-86502-2-0-0-1733537978
Screen Space GI-130375-3-0-3-1734449232
Subsurface Scattering-114114-2-0-0-1733538036
Light Placer-127557-2-5-3-1736038199
Placed Light-135488-2-2-2-1736859787
CS Light-138443-1-2-1-1738021578
HateFakeGlow-99768-0-1-1693661439

 

This together with ParallaxGen, xLODGen and DynDOLOD produce impressive results. Obviously you need the lighting, weather, mesh and texture overhauls as well, but those are personal preference.

 

The issues with CS right now as I see them:

1. There does not seem to be any information on how CS interacts with the vanilla Skyrim ini files, and there's a lot of trial-n-error needed to configure things properly. Both from a visual fidelity and a performance point of view. For instance, the Vanilla HDR module is no longer compatible (it's built-in) but what they forgot to mention is that you get no benefit from it unless you go to the old Vanilla HDR mod page and grab the ini changes required by it. On the other hand, when you figure this out you realize you won't need ReShade to do any kind of brightness, saturation or contrast enhancements. YMMV slightly however, as I already cleaned my IMODs of the desaturation, blur and bloom effects.
2. In some CS MCM screenshots you can see all kinds of adjustment sliders, like parallax intensity and what not - these do not exist (anymore?). Its possible these are only available in the Patreon version, as it's apparently different in *some* way. CS for Nexus users may be a gimped "demo" version. Still, I don't really have anything to complain about as it is. Just saying if you run into issues you expect to "configure away", that may not be an option. Especially coming from ENB with a knob for everything, CS only has the on/off switch.
3. A common misconception people seem to have is that they call ReShade presets "CS presets". CS and ReShade are 2 entirely different things. CS has no presets.
4. CS has no presets? It does actually, but they seem to be tricky to find. They're not advertized anywhere, nor have I seen discussions about them unless I specifically know what to search for: they're called tonemaps. I found a tonemap mod by accident. These have a huge impact on visuals. Edit: This may have been part of a deprecated feature, as I can no longer find it. The "huge impact on visuals" most likely refers to the ini edits from Vanilla HDR.
5. SSGI destroys performance and produces wandering pixels unless set to the Ultra preset. Seems pointless at the moment.
6. The water shader is very picky about which water mod you use. Perhaps the most used one: RWT, will produce what looks like TV static in distant water. I only found 2 water mods that produced nice results, and they were (at least to me) previously unknown ones. One of which was hiding inside a totally unrelated mod as an optional addon. This is the one I'm currently using.
7. Some shadows are dithered, and there doesn't appear to be anything you can do about it.

CS as I have it right now is almost comparable to a performance ENB preset in terms of quality, but it runs at 2x - 4x frame rate. This is with vastly improved LOD, complex materials, 2x texture resolution, LLF lights, long shadows and so on. In a 1:1 situation the performance gain would be even higher. ENB rendered actors, shadows, water and the sun better.

Edited February 26, 2025 by traison

[BattDaPsycho]

Where did you find said Tonemap?

I'm new to CS and am trying to get a better looking skyrim?

I also have reshade installed and have it looking decent after some tweaking but there's definitely room for improvement

[traison]

It was by the author that made Northern Weathers I think, unfortunately that was set to hidden 21 Feb. Trying to locate it...

 

Edit: I remember the fomod asked me which tonemap to activate and I picked one that didn't have cinematic effects on it. This may have been bundled with some other mod as I can't specifically find any mods or files named "tonemap" here.

 

Edit again: Yeah can't find it. Gonna edit it out of my previous post until I stumble upon it again. It might as well not exist until I have proof of it. I wonder if it was a part of Vanilla HDR which I later removed as it turned out it was deprecated. It contains tonemap shaders, and one of them is called "Cinematic" which I distinctly remember being one of the options in the fomod - I didn't pick it because it would have made the game look too different, I prefer a more true-to-vanilla experience. The "huge impact on visuals" most likely refers to the ini edits equired by Vanilla HDR. They still work, this I know for sure.

Edited February 26, 2025 by traison

[traison]

@BattDaPsycho Found the tonemap thing here. Don't get excited over this though, it's still not what I had in my notes earlier. This is simply an IMOD adjuster, despite claiming it needs CS - this is where my earlier confusion came from. It basically does the same thing to Azurite Weathers, as my IMOD "fixing" xEdit script does for everything.

 

I'm relieved I found it however, suggests I was just a little confused, not delusional. I can sleep better now.