Understanding Ambient Light

I really like the ambient light shader. Just would like a little clarification on a few things:

What exactly does AlThreshold do?
Is AlAdapt the ammount of Adaption?
And is AlAdaptBaseMult the ammount of black/adaption to the areas adapted?
What exactly does AlAdaptBaseBlackLvl do?

Thanks for checking this out.

alAdapt》 controls adaptation weight for the added ambient light
alAdaptBaseMult》 controls adaptation weight for the base image (so everything but the ambient light)
alAdaptBaseBlackLvL》controls additional adaptation weight on dark areas of the base image (so basically the curve of alAdaptBaseMult)

alThreshold》 threshold for sources that bleed the ambient light into the scene

Does this answer your question?

Yeah it clarifies it pretty well thanks.

So I tested this.
To clarify on all the stuff, it seems that:

AlAdapt - Controls how much adaption is added to the ambient light (not the base image/areas without ambient light. Just controls the added bloom/light)
I moved this all the way to max (4.00?) and it increased the adaption dramatically of the light/bloom.

AlAdaptBaseMult - Seems to control the shadowing/blackening of areas without ambient light (makes all areas without ambient light darker, and too much can make these areas black)
I found a little bit of this goes a long way.

AlAdaptBaseBlackLvL - seems to control how much the BaseMult makes areas without ambient light black/shadowed. 0 being the most shadowed and 4 being the least. 2-3 seems pretty good with 1 being a little on the dark side and 0 being really dark. 4 seems a little too light but it could work in different games.

alThreshold - I didn't really play with but i'm just assuming it's like bloom threshold and higher values like 80 will make only sky/light objects produce ambient light.

Hey thanks for breaking those down. I am used to using the GemFX standalone from Rome 2 which had different sliders which were much more clear in their functions. I knew there was a way to adjust the darkness on non lit areas just had no idea which slider to use. This game is super washed out and needs quite a bit of contrast and darkening, so this helps a ton.

Irkie500 wrote: Hey thanks for breaking those down. I am used to using the GemFX standalone from Rome 2 which had different sliders which were much more clear in their functions. I knew there was a way to adjust the darkness on non lit areas just had no idea which slider to use. This game is super washed out and needs quite a bit of contrast and darkening, so this helps a ton.

Yeah if anyone else has any questions feel free to ask.

I feel like I'm always the one to ask about the GEMFX shaders lol

To me the ambient light is one of my must haves, it makes such an improvement to the look of the game.

On a side note when I use the mediator for multiple games, why is it that when I load a profile for a different game the preset wont save to what I had enabled for each individual game? Perhaps I am just used to the old .txt files that kept the settings in there.

For example, I have a profile for Fallout 4 and Titan Quest. When loading the profile for Titan Quest it uses all my settings from fallout, and vice versa. I have no idea if this is just how the program works or if I am doing something totally wrong.

I added the game, created a profile, made my changes, hit apply and then push to application. When I close the mediator and open a different game profile, it just loads my most recent changes and not what I had specified for the game itself which is very frustrating.

I am assuming you are talking about presets here that are linked to the game profiles.
Hitting the "Apply" button will only apply all changes to the currently active configuration, not overwrite your selected preset.
This means, if you swap to another preset/profile, those changes have been not stored.
You specifically need to press the "Update" button in the preset section to overwrite a preset.

Then, whenever you load that preset(/or the profile that links to it) those settings will be restored.

Does that answer the question?

Ok that makes sense. I thought the Update button was to only change the name of the profile in the mediator itself and not the actual setting associated with it.

Just to confirm:
Create new profile by clicking "Add" to install reshade
Create preset name and submit
Adjust settings
Click "Apply"
Click "Update"
Click" Push to Application"

Seems like a lot of button pressing to me. Last night I made a bunch of changes to my Fallout 4 profile not knowing I needed to press update I lost all my changes. Any way to combine the update and apply button into one function for future releases? or make the descriptions a bit more clear?

Thanks for all of your hard work, I seriously could not play any game without this program!

I will make sure when I get home that I am doing it properly.

Each button has a different functionality which you do not essentially want to combine.

"Add" you will not use very often
"Apply" we need cause we cannot apply changes on the fly due to ReShade recompiling for every change which may take a while
"Update" is currently separated from "Apply" because it could otherwise screw up your preset
"Push to application" you usually use once you have found a configuration for your app that you are okay with (so like "Add" not as often)

Its a few clicks but the usual thing you do should be the following:
Make changes to a preset.
See those changes in action by pressing "Apply".
Change the settings probably several times while only using "Apply" to see what changed.
Once you okay or feel you need to save what you got "Update" the preset.

We will think about how to make this process shorter and you are welcome to make suggestions too. However, at least from my side, there are not significantly better alternatives that come to my mind currently that cover all that.

(I could add an extra toggle that would allow writing to the preset right away if people would actually want to use that.
Another thing are shortcuts:
Ctr+A for apply, Ctr+S for update, Ctr+d for push to app.
Should make it faster for you.)

I think it would be best to get rid of the "Update" button and add the functionality to "Apply". Because I didn't understand that up to your explanation now either. If one is editing a new preset, he would create a new one in the dropdown list anyway, so nothing can break when updating the changes.

Constantine PC wrote:

Irkie500 wrote: Hey thanks for breaking those down. I am used to using the GemFX standalone from Rome 2 which had different sliders which were much more clear in their functions. I knew there was a way to adjust the darkness on non lit areas just had no idea which slider to use. This game is super washed out and needs quite a bit of contrast and darkening, so this helps a ton.

Yeah if anyone else has any questions feel free to ask.

I feel like I'm always the one to ask about the GEMFX shaders lol

I have a question. Haha.

Would you mind posting the code for your recommended values? I have really only used the defaults in most games. I too have had trouble understanding what does what. I am going to play around some myself, but I would love to see what you recommend starting with.

crosire wrote: I think it would be best to get rid of the "Update" button and add the functionality to "Apply".

I would recommend, at least, change the name from "Update" to "Save current settings to preset". Update by itself is far from being self explanatory.

vfxninjaeditor wrote:

Constantine PC wrote:

Irkie500 wrote: Hey thanks for breaking those down. I am used to using the GemFX standalone from Rome 2 which had different sliders which were much more clear in their functions. I knew there was a way to adjust the darkness on non lit areas just had no idea which slider to use. This game is super washed out and needs quite a bit of contrast and darkening, so this helps a ton.

Yeah if anyone else has any questions feel free to ask.

I feel like I'm always the one to ask about the GEMFX shaders lol

I have a question. Haha.

Would you mind posting the code for your recommended values? I have really only used the defaults in most games. I too have had trouble understanding what does what. I am going to play around some myself, but I would love to see what you recommend starting with.

My values?

I'm recently using:

ALInt - 10-20
ALThreshold stays 15 (havent really played with it)
No dirt effects or lens effects (entire section is 0)
AlAdapt - 3.00-4.00 I've been using 4.00, seems to control ammount of adaption for ambient light added to the scene
AlAdaptBaseMult - 0.08 (what I did was I found a bright white object and lowered this until the non-ambient light areas around it were darkened but not blackened, if that makes sense)
AlAdaptBaseBlackLevel - 4 I was using 3 for a bit but it also increases how blackened areas without ambient light are so I raised it to avoid blackened areas.
everything else is 0 (heat haze/bloom/flare mult's all are off just because i'm not using those effects)

I'd just use the Debug monitor and find a really bright object and tweak it from there.

Recently I've noticed black gun models can make the Adaption portion of Ambient light go crazy. Causing it to flicker (specifically when sprinting with a black gun)

Not sure how that could be related to ambient light and also did not experience that yet. Are you sure it because of ambient light?
Is it possible to record a video from that? Would be helpful

The alAdaptFlareMult, does this apply to guassian anamflare shader or just the anamflare shader?

How does AL_HQAdapt change quality/performance?

I'm really digging AL with the heathaze shader in FO4 too, but is there a way to control when heathaze is applied? The settings section for heathaze doesn't provide for options for what triggers it (right now it appears to be based off red/yellow colors, but we can't tweak what intensity sets it off).

Ganossa wrote: Not sure how that could be related to ambient light and also did not experience that yet. Are you sure it because of ambient light?
Is it possible to record a video from that? Would be helpful

Seems to only happen when AlAdapt is set too high. Probably shouldn't be using 4.00 anyways

Martigen wrote: The alAdaptFlareMult, does this apply to guassian anamflare shader or just the anamflare shader?

Need to check but should apply to both.

Martigen wrote: How does AL_HQAdapt change quality/performance?

It is basically the old way I calculated screen brightness which was a bit more accurate but the default one should do a good job in most cases.

Martigen wrote: I'm really digging AL with the heathaze shader in FO4 too, but is there a way to control when heathaze is applied? The settings section for heathaze doesn't provide for options for what triggers it (right now it appears to be based off red/yellow colors, but we can't tweak what intensity sets it off).

You can use the heat haze adaptation multiplier in the GemFX AL setting. It is not an intensity value but can for now, also keep it in check.

Lucifer I was wondering if you would be willing to give some tips on how to tweak ambient light to suit a game it's being used in.

I often have issues trying to get the effect the way you seem to be able to do it in the demonstration videos