Shader Showcase 00002

Welcome to the second shader showcase which will focus on TreyM and his Film Workshop shader. As you should know by now the goal of this is to bring lesser known shader developers to light. So we can have some insight into what drives them to do the things that they like. 
Q: Please tell us a little about yourself TreyM and your repo.

I got into this hobby as a mod author when I first discovered ReShade at version 1.1. I had been dabbling with SweetFX 1.5.1 for a few months up to that point, but the first real serious experimentation began when I realized that you could bake a 3DLUT into a PNG texture. Since I’m a freelance colorist, I was used to working with LUT files all the time. For those who don’t know, the term “LUT” means “Look Up Table” and is a giant list that tells a computer to convert one set of color values into another set of color values. If I wanted to turn colors that are close to blue into grey, I could use a LUT to do that. If you extrapolate this idea to all the colors and brightnesses in your monitor’s spectrum, you can save an entire color grade or even film color emulation into a single file. So I went to work experimenting with one of my favorite games, Alien Isolation. I was attempting to make it look more like the original Alien film by Ridley Scott. I found that it was pretty easy to do so. Shortly after this initial experimentation, Fallout 4 was released and I dropped my first mod release on Nexusmods.com, titled, “Fallout in Kodachrome”, which was a very basic ReShade config that was one of my earliest attempts to emulate Kodak Kodachrome film. It’s all just gotten more complicated since.

Q: Why did you pick Film Workshop for this showcase?

I decided to showcase Film Workshop because it deals with something very close to my heart, the emulation of film, namely its color, sharpness or softness, and the textures of its grain. However, that isn’t all that Film Workshop is doing. For this release, I’ve crammed the past 5 years of experience into this hobby pursuing this goal of creating the most accurate emulation of film that I currently know how to make. I've tried to include features such as the natural color shifts that occur when using a mismatched film negative in daylight/firelight conditions, or how the light sensitivity rating (ASA/ISO) affects the shadow detail and film grain in the image. A lot of frustrating work has gone into this one, but I think it’s been worth the effort as I am quite proud of the results.


Q: What is the best use case for this shader and how would you use it?

This shader was designed first and foremost as a tool for screenarchers and machinima creators to get more cinematic results by emulating the way movies used to be made before digital cinema cameras took over almost completely, however it is perfectly suitable for gameplay as well. Film Workshop was originally an ENB project released for Fallout 4 around 2017. As far as I know, it was the first mod of its kind in that it used a dual-stage LUT system to emulate the way movies shot exclusively on film are processed. A rough, over-simplified explanation of that process is as follows: The image was captured through the camera lens and the film inside would be exposed to light. This gave us our film negative. That negative was then scanned digitally to be edited into a movie and color graded on a computer. From there, once editing and grading were complete, the negative was sent away to a lab to be printed onto a print stock that was then displayed at a theater.

TreyM Said to drop this video anywhere.............. So I did.

1: Camera to negative
2: Negative to film scanner
3: Scanned negative to computer grading
4: Graded negative to lab for printing
5: Print to theater for viewing the final film.

Film Workshop emulates the negative, color grading, and print stages of this process. Each film stage has its own film grain based on the chosen film stock and can optionally react to light based on its light sensitivity rating, the ASA number (you can think of ASA as the same thing as ISO in a modern digital camera.) You can also optionally have the film introduce the expected color shifts when using a mismatched film type in the “wrong” type of lighting. Film is generally calibrated for two different types of lighting, daylight, and tungsten. Daylight is what you would expect to see on a sunny day outside, and tungsten would be a much warmer orange-ish light. What it means to have tungsten calibrated film, is to say that the film is designed to cool off the scene enough that the warm color of the light looks closer to neutral white. The same goes for daylight calibrated film which is designed to look neutral under daylight conditions. So what happens if you mismatch film types with the “wrong” lighting conditions? Well, you get a strong color cast depending on the scene and the film being used. For example, using tungsten calibrated stock in daylight conditions will give you a much colder, blue-ish tinted image, and shooting a tungsten scene with a daylight stock will give you a VERY warm image. Film Workshop will allow you to play with these ideas.

Q: Any tips for first-time users?

The easiest way to get started with Film Workshop is to just open up the “Film Setup” section and start mixing and matching the Film Negative stocks and the Film Print stocks, if you then combine those color combinations with color grading, the possibilities are endless. For more advanced users, I’ll be posting some tutorials on my YouTube channel soon.

Q: What might we see from you in the future? What are you working on?

I have some plans to release various other effects shortly, free to the public through my Patreon page. Some concerning camera lenses, and others that are more abstract, like emulating the look of a graphic novel or photocopy. Stuff I make can often be quite random and different, so it's hard to know exactly what is next.



As you can see his shader focuses on distinct visual qualities of film and this is ok. Sometimes making a shader on what you love can really bring out the hidden talent of the dev. So please enjoy!

This concludes the second shader showcase. If you have ideas for questions you'd like answered by the next developer I choose please let us know.

Links:  
www.patreon.com/TreyM
www.reddit.com/r/ReShade/
reshade.me/

Users who worked on this post are: 
BlueSkyDefender
CeeJay.dk
TreyM