High Pass Sharpening / Contrast Enhancement

throumbas wrote: I love this, i use it to sharpen Witcher3 while im playing it at a lower res than my native and this does some work!

throumbas wrote: I love this, i use it to sharpen Witcher3 while im playing it at a lower res than my native and this does some work!

Martigen wrote: Yeah it's quite different. I was playing around with this with Pillars of Eternity and I think, subjectively, lumasharpen from SweetFX was doing a better job on fine detail than the high pass sharpen, however the contrast sharpening was an excellent compliment, so I was using luma with contrast I haven't tried it since Ioxa added the midtone sharpening however.

Ioxa wrote: Updated the Reshade + Framework Version.

-Changed the blurring technique used for sharpening. The new one has a much lower performance cost.

-Added options to curve the dark halos only or bright halos only. This article gives a pretty good overview on sharpening, halos, and why you may want to use stronger dark halos.

-Removed all the performance options and made the better performing settings the defaults.

Download for ReShade + Framework Version

// ---- Contrast Enhancement Settings ----
#define CE_Mask               1 //[0|1|2|3] 0 = Off, 1 = Contrast Enhancement, 2 = Contrast De-enhancement?, 3 = Mid-tone Contrast Enhancement
#define CurveCE_Mask          1 //[0 or 1] 0 = Off, 1 = On.
#define CurveCE_Strength   0.20 //[0.00 - 1.00] Higher #'s = stronger effect.
#define CE_MaskWidth       3.00 //#'s > 1 = bigger radius, #'s < 1 = smaller radius
#define CE_MaskQuality        4 //[0 to 5] Higher #'s = more blur passes (Wider, smoother blur). Higher performance cost.
#define ViewCE_Mask           0 //Set to 1 to view the CE_Mask. Helpful when adjusting mask settings. 
#define CE_BlendMode          2 //1 = Soft Light(weak), 2 = Overlay(neutral), 3 = Multiply, 4 = Hard Light, 5 = Vivid Light, 6 = Soft Light#2(lighter), 7 = Soft Light#3(darker) 
#define CE_Strength        0.45 //[0.00 - 1.00]Strength of the Contrast Enhancement effect.

// ---- Performance and Misc Settings ---- (I recommend viewing the respective masks when adjusting these settings)
#define TextureFormat         0 //[0|1|2] 0 = RGBA8, 1 = RGBA16F(shows a little more detail than RGBA8), 2 = RGBA32F
#define SharpTexScale         0 //[0 or 1] 0 = Off, 1 = Scaled up texture for sharp mask. (Higher performance cost, slightly better quality.) 
#define SharpSamples          1 //[0 or 1] 0 = 3 samples, 1 = 5 samples. Setting to 0 slightly lowers performance cost and quality.
#define CETexScale            1 //[0 or 1] 0 = Scaled down texture for contrast enhancement mask (lower performance cost), 1 = No scaling. 
#define CE_Samples            1 //[0 or 1] 0 = 3 samples, 1 = 5 samples. Setting to 0 slightly lowers performance cost and quality.

Marty McFly wrote: Oh and I'm not sure that X passes with low radius gaussian blur is effective for big blur, you might consider increasing the gaussian tap count instead. Plus you can increase offset the more passes you have, i.e. if you go further than 1 pixel in first pass, you get artifacts but when you sample an already blurred image, you can shift the offsets by 10 pixels instead of 1 and you won't see any artifacts.

Marty McFly wrote: You can do something that might speed up preprocessing a bit:

#if CE_MaskQuality == 1 || CE_MaskQuality == 2 || CE_MaskQuality == 3 || CE_MaskQuality == 4 || CE_MaskQuality == 5
#if CE_MaskQuality == 2 || CE_MaskQuality == 3 || CE_MaskQuality == 4 || CE_MaskQuality == 5
#if CE_MaskQuality == 3 || CE_MaskQuality == 4 || CE_MaskQuality == 5
#if CE_MaskQuality == 4 || CE_MaskQuality == 5
#if CE_MaskQuality == 5

why not:

#if CE_MaskQuality >= 1
#if CE_MaskQuality >= 2
#if CE_MaskQuality >= 3
#if CE_MaskQuality >= 4
#if CE_MaskQuality >= 5


?

Oh and I'm not sure that X passes with low radius gaussian blur is effective for big blur, you might consider increasing the gaussian tap count instead. Plus you can increase offset the more passes you have, i.e. if you go further than 1 pixel in first pass, you get artifacts but when you sample an already blurred image, you can shift the offsets by 10 pixels instead of 1 and you won't see any artifacts.

Ioxa wrote: Yeah, I removed the performance options to make things less confusing. It was my plan from the start to get rid of them once I decided which settings were the best mix of quality and performance. I may put those options back in when the mediator is released though, along with a bunch of other options that are just too confusing to use in a config file. I actually made 3 samples the default because like you said, the difference was marginal, and I think it's something like 40% less texture fetches. For the low-fi and high-fi versions, are you talking about the texture format or the scaling? I made the lowest quality of both of those settings the default. If you want to change them you can do it in the .h file, in the future I'll try to add comments in the code for this stuff.

The mid-tone options use a mask which blocks pixels below ~0.3 and pixels over ~0.8 from the effect so it will look different depending on what the darkest and brightest pixels in the scene are.

throumbas wrote: Any chance for a SweetFX download of the new version?

Martigen wrote: Could you maybe add a single toggle for 'HQ mode' that enables 5 samples for both high-pass and contrast shader, and the full res CE tex scale (no scaling)? I didn't see any noticeable difference for the high-pass sharpener upscaled mode in my limited testing, and I imagine that's the most demanding toggle, so that could be left as is.

Martigen wrote: I'll have to test it with more games, but when playing around with it in Pillars what I noticed was *only* the brightest pixels being affected (they became brighter, while mid-tones seemed unaffected), hence wondering if it's working correctly. This was for mid-tone contrast, hadn't played with mid-tone sharpening yet.

Ioxa wrote: Something isn't quite right with it. I know it affects dark pixels but using it in Dead Space 2 I'm noting the same thing you're talking about. It could be an issue with the blend modes, I'm going to look into that. I'm also trying to come up with an easy way to adjust the mid-tone mask. For now it seems like blend mode 7 has the least impact on bright pixels.

Martigen wrote: Good to know I'm not going mad! I don't think it's in the blending though, as if you turn on ViewCE_Mask you can see the result we're seeing before the blend pass (at least, I presume this is the case as changing blend mode has no effect on what's displayed by ViewCE_Mask), so perhaps it's the equation.

Wicked Sick wrote: Hey, ioxa, I am trying the Gauss bloom and I am happy with it. I didn't recall it being like this (the glow in the trees's trunk):

i.imgur.com/UwFVHf4.jpg

I really like it

i.imgur.com/lBIC06T.jpg

I am still struggling with debaing, tho

Thank you.

• The Borderlands series of games
• Pillars of Eternity
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Sunless Sea
• Shadowrun: Dragonfall
• Telltale game series

// ---- Contrast Enhancement Settings ----
#define CE_Mask               1 //[0|1|2|3] 0 = Off, 1 = Contrast Enhancement, 2 = Contrast De-enhancement?, 3 = Mid-tone Contrast Enhancement
#define CurveCE_Mask          1 //[0 or 1] 0 = Off, 1 = On.
#define CurveCE_Strength   0.20 //[0.00 - 1.00] Higher #'s = stronger effect.
#define CE_MaskWidth       3.00 //#'s > 1 = bigger radius, #'s < 1 = smaller radius
#define CE_MaskQuality        4 //[0 to 5] Higher #'s = more blur passes (Wider, smoother blur). Higher performance cost.
#define ViewCE_Mask           0 //Set to 1 to view the CE_Mask. Helpful when adjusting mask settings. 
#define CE_BlendMode          2 //1 = Soft Light(weak), 2 = Overlay(neutral), 3 = Multiply, 4 = Hard Light, 5 = Vivid Light, 6 = Soft Light#2(lighter), 7 = Soft Light#3(darker) 
#define CE_Strength        0.55 //[0.00 - 1.00]Strength of the Contrast Enhancement effect.

// ---- Performance and Misc Settings ---- (I recommend viewing the respective masks when adjusting these settings)
#define TextureFormat         0 //[0|1|2] 0 = RGBA8, 1 = RGBA16F(shows a little more detail than RGBA8), 2 = RGBA32F
#define SharpTexScale         0 //[0 or 1] 0 = Off, 1 = Scaled up texture for sharp mask. (Higher performance cost, slightly better quality.) 
#define SharpSamples          0 //[0 or 1] 0 = 3 samples, 1 = 5 samples. Setting to 0 slightly lowers performance cost and quality.
#define CETexScale            1 //[0 or 1] 0 = Scaled down texture for contrast enhancement mask (lower performance cost), 1 = No scaling. 
#define CE_Samples            1 //[0 or 1] 0 = 3 samples, 1 = 5 samples. Setting to 0 slightly lowers performance cost and quality.