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pictureamoebae · 6 years

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would you ever post tutorials on how to achieve the effect on your latest pictures? watching you do reshade is truly a work of art O_O

I’m blushing, anon. You can’t see me, but I’m blushing.

When I make the pictures with the weird effects I’m generally tweaking shaders on a picture-by-picture basis, so there are no specific values or numbers to input that I could tell everyone about that would achieve the same thing wherever you wanted to take a picture. But I’ll ramble on regardless!

The key is experimentation.

Experiment with shaders that do things that look weird, and experiment with changing the values outside of their recommended ranges (you’ll often have to double-click on the input field to type in numbers manually once you’ve hit the maximum or minimum end of the slider).

For example, for the picture right before this reply I used the HQ4X shader. Without changing any of the settings it’s a relatively uninspiring thing that just makes the screen a bit blurry and tries to smooth out some edges. But what I did was fiddle with a few values and then whacked up the strength to 200, which gave me the weird effect you see here (I had to increase that number to 942 in order to reproduce the same effect when hotsampling with SRWE to 6000x3000px, because most shader effects don’t automatically scale with resolution).

For my sandstorm picture I had already set up the leifx shader to create some nice pink-toned richness (it also has epic yet fine and dainty scan lines), and I started messing around with the deband shader settings. I use deband all the time with very mild values to counteract some of the banding effects that occur when you use a lot of shaders, but by increasing some of the values (some of them far higher than they’re meant to go) you end up with something that looks very painterly. That, combined with the leifx shader, as well as the adaptive fog and depth haze shaders I regularly use, gave that sandstormy look.

All this fiddling around takes a lot time. It’s not for the fainthearted!

Ultimately, my super short and handy little list of tips would be:

Make a copy of your preset before starting in case you change something to one of your regular shaders and can’t remember the original values. (I have done this. A lot. It’s painful. I still do it. It’s still painful.)

Try new shaders that you wouldn’t think of using, even if they don’t look very interesting with their default values.

Try using really extreme values (for new shaders you’re experimenting with, or with the shaders you usually use), because this is where the magic usually happens.

Mix-n-match shaders that otherwise don’t necessarily look amazing, because the most unexpected things might end up complimenting each other.

Sometimes a screenshot will look different to how it looks in-game if a shader is one that has motion (for example the glitch shader, which I used in these pictures). You may have to take a few sample screenshots.

If you use SRWE to hotsample you will probably have to work out different (higher) values so that the effect looks the same at a higher resolution as it does when you’re setting it up.

Be prepared to go down the rabbit hole. Once you’ve popped you can’t stop.

Abandon all hope for sanity once you start editing the shader code directly in the files (as I have done to get matso’s dof looking like this and like this, and this in ME:A).

You can check out my OKAY THEN album on flickr for some of my weird experiments across a few different games. Judge for yourself the success of them, lol.

I first started using other people’s ENBs (like ReShade but in some ways better) at the end of 2012 with Skyrim. I started experimenting with tweaking SweetFX (like ReShade but worse) in 2013. I started experimenting a little with tweaking ENB things later that year. By mid-2013 I’d got my own customised version of someone else’s ENB for Skyrim. Towards the end of that year I was helping an ENB preset author with their latest one. In April 2014 I released my first SweetFX preset (for ESO). [In May 2014 I started playing TS3!] When DA:I came out I started making ReShade presets for it (unreleased, just for my own fun). That was really when I got stuck in and learned a lot more about how to put a preset together.

That’s a lot of fiddling and learning from when I started encountering this sort of thing in 2012 and when I felt confident enough to put together entire presets and achieve specific goals in a vaguely competent way. Since then there have been various misadventures with Mass Effects, random smaller games, and of course my epic adventures in TS4.

And I still know nothing.

I’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to editing the shaders themselves. I don’t understand the language, and have only attempted to tweak the odd number (sometimes with shader-breaking results). I spend some time now and again on the ReShade forum. I browse around the threads where shader creators are chatting, and I don’t understand half of what they say but over time little bits of floating knowledge sinks in.

And that’s how it works, really. You roll your sleeves up and get stuck in, hack away at some numbers, see what breaks and what doesn’t, read why it broke, follow people who do amazing things with shaders and see what they do (I should add when I was playing Skyrim that’s when I fell in with a super great screenshot crowd– was in the right place at the right time and I owe absolutely all of it to that), and try it for yourself. Eventually cool things will happen. Usually sooner than you think.

And if you want to see how screenshots are really made, take a look through this flickr group and be amazed.

#reshade faq #reshade tutorial #anonymous

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