More powerful Deband or color shade smoothening

Hello,
I am just wondering if it is possible to create a more powerful, or maybe different kind of deband shader.
As an example..

If it could melt these shades of the green colors together in a better way despite them beeing kind of far apart in shades. Of course, a threshold slider would be nice to have to decide how far away shades can be before beeing ignored. Is this possible?

I found these pictures and they kind of show what I mean. They are from something called mesh shading wich I dont think have anything to do with this. But the pictures shows what I mean. As you can see it smoothens the difference between different shades. I can not believe this is impossible with Reshade, right? I mean, as far as I know this is basicly what Deband does, however I can not make it strong enough to get this result.


From this
To this

Note that I dont think this has anything to do with mesh shading. No depth buffer would be needed since I just want it to smooth similar shades out on the whole screen.

On "mesh shading": This is not what deband does. What you see in the image there is the difference between vertex lighting and pixel lighting. In the former lighting calculations are done for each vertex of a triangle, so a total of three times and the results are interpolated across the triangle surface. In the latter lighting is done for every pixel the rasterized triangle affects, which obviously is much more accurate. Pretty much every modern game does pixel lighting. Either way, this is done during geometry rendering and has nothing to do with post-processing, nor can it be done there (by definition).

As for general debanding: You always run into danger of just blurring the entire picture (since that's technically what debanding does, but it tries to only do so locally at the artifacts). So I'm not sure this can be improved much further.

Surface blur might work.

Thanx for your answers. Well, I just chose those pictures because they show kind of what I want. I have not seen any kind of shader that melts shades close to each other that good. But of course, I dont even know if it is posible.
Like on this picture

If you look on the ground there is alot of different shaded of yellow/orange and if it would be possible to make those shades bleed together better I think it would be awesome. I dont know what surface blur is either. But if the picture were blured it would not give the desired effect I am after.
It could have a threshold slider that ignores to blur together shades that are a certain amount of steps away from each other in the color spectrum. For example the green and yellow are not close so they should not bleed together.
This would give a effect very much like Waifu2x looks like I think, but still be usable in real time. But like I said, maybe this is not possible?

Here is another example that shows what I mean
Here is the original



As you can see here, not much details are loss but the difference between shades are nicer looking

I am gonna try surface blur when I get home from work. Seem to do what I want in photoshop on the pictures I have found. Thanx!

Ioxa, is it possible to get surface blur for older versions of ReShade? This one github.com/crosire/reshade-shaders/blob/...aders/SurfaceBlur.fx does not have all I need I think. Like .h file and settings. At least not how I understands it.

mickevincent wrote: Ioxa, is it possible to get surface blur for older versions of ReShade? This one github.com/crosire/reshade-shaders/blob/...aders/SurfaceBlur.fx does not have all I need I think. Like .h file and settings. At least not how I understands it.

There is an old version in this post, it's called bilateral filter.
reshade.me/forum/shader-presentation/529...contrast-enhancement

Thank you. It doesnt seem to work as the surface blur in photoshop, but maybe that one is using a too big algorithm.

I'm sure the one in Photoshop is far better than anything I could ever come up with. They may have better edge detection or maybe a larger blur radius. For my version I limited the blur radius because it starts getting really expensive to run. Using more iterations gives a larger radius without as big of a performance hit but there may be a loss in quality.
If you have the time I wouldn't mind seeing some comparisons though, I may be able to make some adjustments to improve things.

Thank you.
On this particular picture it might seem like little difference. But on some other it will show more.

ReShade


As you can see the ground still has more, uhm.. "noise" from the low res original picture with ReShades filter. But
still in the area I have marked with a circle, the detail loss are lower with the photoshop one.

Photoshop


Here is another with Photoshop


It seems to be able to filter out more "bad parts" while still keeping sharp lines and small details better, the photoshop one.

Yeah, it looks like it is doing a better job of detecting edges in the dark areas. I have a few ideas to improve that but there may be trade-offs in other places.
What kind of settings re you using in ReShade and what settings are you using in Photoshop?

I managed to get a more similar look with the help of Retroarch shaders. I thank you for your help anyway Ioxa