What it is
The MasterEffect shadersuite is a huge shader library for ReShade, containing everything from simple image adjustments like color saturation, contrast and brightness to complex post processing effects which let today's triple A video game titles look they way they do, such as Depth of Field, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, Bloom, Lens Flares and many more. No matter if you want to compensate monitor specific color differences or spice up old titles to a point where they put 5 years newer titles to shame, MasterEffect contains everything you can imagine and more.
Originally a small shader collection for the popular ENBSeries mod in an attempt to unify all different shader plugins available, MasterEffect quickly grew to the huge shader library it is today. Powered by ReShade, giving your game a graphical rejuvenating has never been so easy.
The project is currently on hold, no new features will be added but to the McFX suite in the ReShade Framework.
Although there will still be full support for MasterEffect and bugs will get fixed, only no new features. DOWNLOAD:
current: 1.1.287
legacy: 1.1.190 1.1.115 1.1.111 1.0.341 1.0.340 1.0.321 1.0.315 1.0.302 FEATURES
COLOR EFFECTS
-LUT mapping
-Cartoon shader
-TV Levels shader
-Technicolor
-Cineon DPX shader
-Monochrome
-Lift Gamma Gain
-Tonemap shader
-Vibrance
-Curves
-Sepia
-Skyrim Tonemapping
-Color Mood
-Cross Process
-Filmic Pass
-Reinhard (both linear and regular)
-Colormod (GTASA mod, features ported to ME)
-Spherical Tonemap (Watch Dogs)
-Sin City shader
-Color Hue FX

LIGHTING EFFECTS
-Lensdirt
-Gaussian Anamorphic Lensflare
-Bloom
-ENB Lensflare "Lenzflare"
-John Chapman's Lensflare
-Godrays
-Matso's Anamorphic Lensflare

DEPTH BASED
-Crysis SSAO
-Nvidia HBAO
-OBGE SSGI
-Alchemy SAO
-Raymarched SSAO
-Raymarched HBAO
-Blender Depth of Field
-Magic Depth of Field (separable, extremely performance friendly)
-gp65cj042 Depth of Field (AMD DOF)
-Matso DOF (Skyrim)

IMAGE ENHANCEMENTS
-Sharpening
-Fisheye/Chromatic Aberration
-Film Grain
-Explosion
-SMAA
-Heathaze
-LED

OVERLAYS
-HeliosDoubleSix Vignette
-Boris Vorontsov Vignette
-Border
-Movie Bars CHANGELOG
1.1.287: Fixed HDR level mode. Added 3D LUT support and LUT color amount. Swapped AA and Chromatic Aberration order. Added Raymarched HBAO. Added Alchemy SAO. Added LED shader. Changed AO smoothening from gaussian to linear. Added AO sharpness detection mode for use of normal map difference. Added AO depth fade. Increased performance and compilation time for two AO methods. Added AO texture scale for running it in lower resolution. Currently no higher resolution mode than native possible because fullscreen AO with maximum tap count is quite enough even for very HD screenshots.
1.1.205: Added screenspace reflections, no config values atm because shader is highly experimental.
1.1.190: Modified AO sharpness to use linearized depth instead of raw depth, produces better AO in far areas. Added HBAO. Added Global Illumination. Added Heathaze effect. Added togglekey support. Added info overlay when compiling (disableable at end of config file). Slightly altered config layout.
1.1.115: Fixed compiler errors on ReShade 0.16.0 and earlier (only on OpenGL), fixed SMAA not working, modified masking to prevent the masked areas affecting non-masked areas.
1.1.111: Major update: Rewritten from ground up for better performance and efficiency, moved configuation to MasterEffect.ini, moved all extra resources to MasterEffect folder, combined all AO and DOF techniques for easier configuration, new config layout, added HUD masking, added HDR level parameter for easy rendering bit depth switching, numerous bugfixes. Compatible only to ReShade 0.15.0+
1.0.341: Fixed compatibility with ReShade 0.15.0+
1.0.340: Added Raymarched AO, Chapman's lensflare. Fixed several code parts, fixed splitscreen not working for Magic DOF.
1.0.321 Added magic DOF shader, a hexagonal DOF that is capable of creating insane blur amounts. Due to its nature, this method most likely produces some minor artifacts.
1.0.315: fixed mipmap count, modified SSAO for more performance, added lensflare blur, added FXAA, fixed depth check for lighting effects
1.0.302: initial release

Hi Marty,

Is there any chance to see some kind of eye/tonemap adaptation shader in your awesome shadersuite?
And different methods of ambient occlusion, like hbao, ssdo etc.

Thanks.

jigurdan wrote:
That would require average image brightness over a time delta which means average image brightness of more frames that the current one which is for now the only one available. I could write a shader like that but it would be extremely sensible and would react immediately which is not how adaptation works. Or would you want an image that flickers every time you move the camera?

About different ambient occlusion/obscurance algorithms, I tried (and failed) to port Alchemy AO. I'm uncertain how it works + it uses some essential variables which are apparently declared inside the demo script so I can never find out what these are. Many AO techniques cannot be used because they don't purely use depth buffer, many rely on Projection/World matrices which ReShade cannot access. Before I finally came up with the current algorithm which is heavily based on Crysis 1 AO, I tried a few other algorithms with no success. I remember porting a HBAO shader but it had extreme accuracy problems, probably needed a 32 bit depth buffer. The idea is not out of my head since I'm always on the hunt for new shading techniques but there are other things to tackle like AA which are the only thing that people miss.

Hi Marty and thank you for your awesome MER shadersuite. I just wanted to ask you does the depth check parameter in Anamlensflares and lensflares work ? Because when i enable it in any game with access to depth buffer it seems that it is not working both for anamlensflares and lensflares.

Thanks for all your hard work. To me, ReShade isn't complete without your shaders. Is there any possibility of adding SMAA to that list? As much as I love your shaders I really miss the ability to add anti-aliasing. Downsampling can only accomplish so much.

robgrab wrote:
I want to request the same thing. Will you add SMAA to your MasterEffect shaders?

@Nekrik: It works, and it does not work. I ported those shader straight from ENBSeries, where depth buffer is not so curved like in ReShade. a value of 0.97 is almost 1.0 in ENB but only like 30 metres distance in ReShade where the whole kilometre to the sky is within 0.97-1.0. To make the depth buffer experience almost linear (depth output) I had to use depth^50 to make it look properly. It has its good sides though, a depth buffer like this pays enormeous attention to close objects. 1.0.315 (just added) has it fixed.

@robgrab, paxton676: Maybe, I haven't yet worked with it or tried to find out how it works. Remember, I'm an ENB guy, as far as I know, SMAA needs rendering into texture which ENB is not capable of so I never worked with it. FXAA is added though, a modified algorithm we ENB people used to use, because for some reason implementing FXAA3_11.h did not work (shader compiled but no visual changes visible).

Can't wait to try the latest version. Unfortunately I can't until I get home from work. Stupid jobs.

I have been tyrying to download this file for the past few hours. I'm not sure if it was pulled or there's a problem with MediaFire. Can someone post an alternate link?

Nevermind. Got it.

Thank you, Marty, i appreciate your work ! Looking forward to the day when you leave your dof-baby free.

Yes, thank you for this wonderful set of toys. It's given me a reason to install a bunch of games in my Steam backlog. I messed with it a little last night and I noticed the performance was much worse than 1.0.302. Seems odd since I was using the exact same shaders (and settings) as before.

Same Here. I observed some performance drop, lost at least 5 frames (55 from solid 60) in Hard Reset using 1.0.315.

May that be because I left Lenz on by accident? I made no major changes which would explain such a result. All I did was changing SSAO, adding FXAA, changing 3 numbers from 0.97 to 0.9999 and reducing the mipmap count of several textures which should even give performance but never take performance away.
EDIT: I sometimes play with the values, so if you now enable SSAO or such, it may be that values from 302 and 315 do not match. Please make sure you have the same values for all enabled effects.

@Topic: I'm currently writing a DOF shader from scratch. It can only do hexagonal bokeh but at no fps cost, even excessive sample counts. This picture here shows a 721 tap blur:

With naive DOF approach, this would've been in fact 721 samples, every DOF shader would refuse to compile a such high loop count. My approach however (taken from some paper by overlaying two different shapes) does this with only 2*15 + 4*15 = 90 samples. 90 samples take a noticeable bit of performance, yes but this is an extreme advantage over 721 samples which would be the case with naive approach. Moderate blur radii / quality settings run with almost no fps cost.

Exactly what i want, a nice DoF that doesnt take too much.
Looking forward for it + the new lensflares.

matsilagi wrote:
Oh, thanks for reminding, I already forgot those when I spent 2 hours trying to make that damn color bleeding every DOF shader suffers from as low as possible. I have a solution for it which is even better than AMD's solution in that one paper I've read about advanced DOF but unfortunately it can never work with this DOF approach.

Marty McFly wrote: Im pretty sure you will find another way around. You always do, just try to chill a bit sometimes :v

Chilling out when I see something that is not working 100% is not my nature.

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Updated to 1.0.321, I've added a huge new DOF shader as proposed, huge blur radii at low fps cost and higher tap count than normal DOF shaders would compile properly. I decided to update so frequently because I may not do anything for weeks, that's usually my style of work, a few hours extreme dedication and then days of procrastination. Chapman's lensflare didn't make it yet, sorry for delay.

they are taking the hobbits to isengard

Marty McFly wrote: Hmm, i like your style, your the kind of guy that doesnt give up while the error at line X stop printing. Just like me when i code for GMod, awesome work

Just wanted to say, Thank you Marty McFly. Awesome compilation!

Only problem that I would have is to get the DOF to pass through the HUD without being applied to it, and I assume thats game specific,

Any ideas on what I can do or what information to look at.. - Stalker CoP is the game in question

Its part of the depth detection, there's no way exactly to stop it rendering over the HUD.
But, to counter that you can try changing its near focus to something higher, so it would draw less over your HUD (However, it will also affect how far the DoF is rendered).