Lot of shaders, especially tonemaps done wrong!

This kinda drives me nuts - hell lot of shader in pack are real mess adapted by people who dont really understand actual purpose of such shader.

Just look at filmic tonemap from reshade framework:



Does anyone think this is desired and good looking result?

Blacks and white are totally destroyed and whole picture is desaturated and dimmed as hell, this is not how filmic tonemap results should look, this is how filmicgames.com/archives/75

And thats just one example of many - HPD, Watchdog tonemap (which is also form of filmic tonemap) are ruined, Reinhard applied to RGB instead of only luminance, Skyrim tonemap totally broken, spherical and so on

Mosto of those shaders supposed to solve color problem like banding, incorrect gamma, some of them adapted for tv with color range 16-235 and supposed to operate in that mode, other not supposed to be applied to RGB
and intended to be used with other color spaces. but most of them just packed in as some fancy effects that wrongly implemented, does not serve their purpose and simply ruining colors.

But ofcourse internet kids turning all that crap on and thinking that 50 shades of grey they get in result are uber realistic graphics and super cool shaders that makes their bad looking game kinda "good".

And they dont really know what good is, as well as people who implemented such shaders in reshade disribution, people just trust that fancy shader is making something good by default.
This gives people bad taste for graphics, and when hell lot of skyrim and gtav owners flooding internets with "cool looking" shots of crap with ruined colors, marketing devisions of companies takes that
as trend and pushing it to development division (sometime devs doing this dumb thing on their own) and then we get crap like lens flares, lens dirtt, 50 shades of grey, vignette and totally messed up colors
in almost every game and not option to turn all of this off and use correct colors instead.

Shader contributors should be more responsible for what they do and should not trow in every fancy shader they found wiithout real understanding of it.

Something should be done about this. Reshade and SweetFX (even it suffers from tones of useless shaders with wrong implementation of configuration, but less) just bloated by broken shaders like this.
They needs to be rewriten with ACTUAL research of what they do and how they supposed to do it

Feel free to contribute here

github.com/crosire/reshade-shaders

That sounds professional, sure.
But may that be that you also misunderstood the purpose of those shaders? Tone mapping isn't supposed to solve banding at all, it is used to compress HDR color range into LDR. Our game input is either from a LDR game or already tone mapped, hence the "dimmed" look of the example image you posted.

So essentially, the tone mapping is "useless". I carried them over from ENB where tonemapping was needed as ENB receives HDR input because it replaces the postprocessing.
On Reshade, tonemappers are just used to give the image a different look, how they do that isn't exactly relevant. On some games the look may appear fitting, plus most of the time the shaders aren't preconfigured at all so the default settings look poor, naturally.

On a completely other area, I totally agree that people tend to enable everything and overdo everything to an extent that you can't see anything anymore. But that was always the thing with graphics mods. And if it reflects the user's preferences, who are we to judge.

color corrections are recommended to be integrated in LUT, like most of the modern games do in postprocess.

Tonemappers are not completely useless, adaptation for one are usually integrated in tonemapping functions to apply different curves for different lighting condition.

In other words, LUT is enough for curve control in RGBA8 if you don't use adaptation.

Btw, about curves, I'm pretty sure technicolor S-Curve in sweetfx is inverted.

I've noticed in the screenshots thread a lot of people don't mind the extra effects (especially those who post pictures that look extremely dim)

But yea, as said, who are we to judge who uses what/likes what? I personally only use Curves, GemFX Bloom, Levels, Vibrance, and Lumisharpen. (sometimes SMAA if needed) My only gripe is people need to stop making things look so dim and dark! The whites are missing in so many pictures.

You can make things bad or good given any set of tools to work with, I really don't see the point of this post. People have vary degrees of experience and taste just like they do in any area such as music, film, photography and other art forms. There's lots of terrible sounding music out there, so what? You don't have to listen to it.

You can use Spherical Tonemap or Reinhard and correct the white point.

I think I used the tonemapping pretty well in this screenshot, so I think they definitely have a place.

Your screenshot is dimmed, so technically speaking you dont have correct white point.

3D lut is best shader for almost everything, including correction of white point and its easy to do by using screenshots of vaniall game and histogram in any image editor and aproximating best looking corrections for all of screenshots and than saving that to neutral 3d lut texture.

As for reinhard shader itself, while random play with values can change something for better, its implementation is wrong both in sweetfx and other shaders it just used out of context, and default values useles.

Hell lot of shaders in pack just practically uselss and dont serve their actual purpose, people just randomly play with values until they get some results (good or bad) that they kinda like.

You are a mathematician, not an artist, obviously.
As I said already, tonemapping already tone mapped images is practically senseless, it's essentially color grading. Code is on github, feel free to commit changes.

v00d00m4n wrote: 3D lut is best shader for almost everything, including correction of white point and its easy to do by using screenshots of vaniall game and histogram in any image editor and aproximating best looking corrections for all of screenshots and than saving that to neutral 3d lut texture.

Could you perharps explain this? Ive got CS 2015, how do i do this? How do i save my image corrections as 3d lut texture?