need help understanding DOF

Hello all iv been messing around with reshade in the emulator CEMU for Zelda breath of the wild..but I can not for the life of me figure out how to get it to work properly. everything i have tryd creates a blure effect .but it dose it to the hole screen..how do i just blur the distance? im a bit lost with it all and could do with some help understanding how to get the effect to work correctly. thanks

Do you have depth in the game? Enable the depth shader and it should show a grayscale image with the depth map.

FierySwordswoman wrote: Do you have depth in the game? Enable the depth shader and it should show a grayscale image with the depth map.

Hey thanks for replying.. depth shader? im not sure what that is.. there is something called display depth in the shader menu list. but when i enable it my screen just goes black. can you explain a bit more on what i need to do to get this to hopefully work.. thanks

     If the screen just goes black you don't have depth access, therefore you cannot use depth-based effects like DOF and MXAO. The best you can try is to mess around with the depth options in the preprocessor settings to see if they fix it.

     ReShade tries to access two different types of information from the game to use for shader effects: color and depth.
-Color is simply which pixels are what color which is needed by basically every shader. This information is only two-dimensional, however, which means...
-Depth is needed for ReShade to know where objects are in 3d space. The best way to describe it is to look at this pic:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Z_buffer.svg
     The bottom image is the depth information of the top image. When you enable "Display Depth" it should produce a result similar in style to the bottom image if ReShade has access to the game's depth buffer. This information lets you know if two objects are close to each other for MXAO or where the foreground ends and the background begins for DOF. Great huh?
     Only problem is that, for a variety of reasons, ReShade can't access the depth buffer in a lot of games/programs. Hell, from what I've found only about 15% of games work properly with it, so don't get too bummed if the more complicated effects don't work.

reshade will automatically disable depthbuffer access if it detects any networking activity from the game process. this is an anti-cheat measure, to prevent people from being able to peer through fog, highlight targets that are peeking through distant windows, etc.

FierySwordswoman wrote:      If the screen just goes black you don't have depth access, therefore you cannot use depth-based effects like DOF and MXAO. The best you can try is to mess around with the depth options in the preprocessor settings to see if they fix it.

     ReShade tries to access two different types of information from the game to use for shader effects: color and depth.
-Color is simply which pixels are what color which is needed by basically every shader. This information is only two-dimensional, however, which means...
-Depth is needed for ReShade to know where objects are in 3d space. The best way to describe it is to look at this pic:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Z_buffer.svg
     The bottom image is the depth information of the top image. When you enable "Display Depth" it should produce a result similar in style to the bottom image if ReShade has access to the game's depth buffer. This information lets you know if two objects are close to each other for MXAO or where the foreground ends and the background begins for DOF. Great huh?
     Only problem is that, for a variety of reasons, ReShade can't access the depth buffer in a lot of games/programs. Hell, from what I've found only about 15% of games work properly with it, so don't get too bummed if the more complicated effects don't work.

thanks for replying again.. i dont understand..if what you say is true. then why is the same thing happening with the witcher 3? there are reshade presets for this game so i know it workes.. yet when i enable display depth..i get exactly the same issue. a black screen.

I have not really a good understanding of how to use reshade properly. all I understand is messing with the sliders and checking the boxes..but it seems that there is more to it then just that ..i have to enable sertin things in a ini file and not in the gui itself..but i dont no about this enough to no what settings to enable within the ini..thanks

domjam wrote: then why is the same thing happening with the witcher 3? there are reshade presets for this game so i know it workes.. yet when i enable display depth..i get exactly the same issue. a black screen.

It's finicky like that. Simple changes in your setup can be the difference between it working perfectly and not at all.
In Star Wars Battlefront II I tested it for depth a few months ago and got a perfect buffer, but now the buffer only has the 1st person arms rendering it effectively useless.
So, IDK what to tell you. You can try messing around with compatibility settings, on-screen displays, etc. to see if anything produces a result.