Eye adaption w/ wide gamut fix (ReShade preset)
** This is a ReShade preset and it needs ReShade post-processing injector installed to your flight simulator. **
Eye adaption in MSFS is currently nerfed severely. That means that image looks very dim on overcast conditions and at dusk or dawn. Especially cockpit is often too dark. This preset is to mitigate the lack of proper eye adaption / auto exposure in MSFS. With this fix, you will see better in dark. You can now properly see the full moon lightening the scenery when conditions are right. You also will definitely need to dim down you displays at the night time, as you would do in real life.
The other purpose of this preset is to fix colors for the users of wide gamut monitors. The same image looks different on standard sRGB monitor and on so called wide gamut monitor. Bright reds and greens tend to oversaturate making visuals unnatural. Depending on you monitor, the gamut effect may or may not work for you, but you can always disable it, or try another setting that I use. For me "Adobe RGB" works the best, but "Wide Gamut RGB" may work better for some other monitors.
I also added nice little bloom effect and experimental green reduce LUT. You may enable/disable them in ReShade's UI.
Shaders used in the preset
EyeAdaption_modded.fx (original version from Brussell)
- Imitates human eye's adaption to darker lighting conditions.
- Added two parameters to standard version: max brightening and luma detection input curve.
PD80_01_Color_Gamut.fx (Prod80)
- Corrects game's color space for wide gamut monitors for more natural colors. Try "Adobe RGB" or "Wide Gamut RGB" settings.
- Removes green tint.
PD80_05_Sharpening.fx (Prod80)
- Adds luma sharpening to near camera objects, eg. cockpit instruments making them more readable.
PD80_04_Contrast_Brightness_Saturation.fx (Prod80)
- This is for fine tuning balance between cockpit and scenery lighting.
Curves.fx (SweetFX)
- Acts as a counter effect for a bit too washed out look after boosting the lightness
PD80_02_Bloom.fx (Prod80)
- Adds slight amount of bloom effect. More than MSFS's bloom does though.
LUT.fx
- Experimental, disabled by default.
- Very subtly reduces saturation of the most saturated neon like green-cyan colors.
- This also reduces green text on on Garmin devices or other displays. Ideally effect should be applied
only on scenery and not on cockpit, but unfortunately the shader does not support depth information
CinematicDOF.fx (OtisFx)
- For taking screenshots, enabled in DOF preset. High quality depth of field filter with mouse auto focusing. Only enabled in extra DOF preset. Needs depth buffer.
Getting ReShade
There are two versions of ReShade, one works with Steam version and another with MS Store version.
1. Official version (for Steam) is downloadable from https://reshade.me
Download version 5.5.2 with full addon support. That version enables depth based effects, which are not mandatory, but gives better results.
2. Special UWP fork (for MS Store) is downloadable from github
I have no knowledge about it's installation process, but FinalLight's preset uses it. The version included in the downloadable mat not support depth effects though, or some effects be incompatible with it. FinalLight's preset is found from here: FinalLight's preset
Installing ReShade (for Steam)
Run the installer. Search for FlightSimulator.exe from your Steam installation path. Skip using preset file. You will add it later manually. Install shaders from libraries SweetFx, Prod80, OtisFX. If you don't want to install them all, select at least these:
SweetFx
Prod80
- PD80_01_Color_Gamut.fx
- PD80_02_Bloom.fx
- PD80_03_Curved_Levels.fx
- PD80_03_Shadows_Midtones_Highlights.fx
- PD80_04_Contrast_Brightness_Saturation.fx
- PD80_06_Luma_Fade.fx
OtisFx
WARNING:
Installing ReShade may broke your MSFS installation, so it does not start. If this happens try deleting DirectX shader cache via Explore's Disk Cleanup operation.
Installing the preset
IMPORTANT! Before upgrading from 1.0 DELETE these shaders from /Shaders directory
- CinematicDOF.fx
- PD80_00_Base_Effects.fxh
- PD80_00_Blend_Modes.fxh
- PD80_00_Color_Spaces.fxh
- PD80_00_Noise_Sampler.fxh
- PD80_01_Color_Gamut.fx
- PD80_01_Bloom.fx
- PD80_04_Contrast_Brightness_Saturation.fx
- PD80_05_Sharpening.fx
All these should be found already in subdirectories of /Shaders. If you don't have these. Run the ReShade installer again and modify.
Actual installation
Extract the zip file. Copy the contents of EyeAdaption_Reshade directory to Flight Simulator application directory, where the .exe file is located, NOT in the community folder. Replace existing files.
Enabling depth buffer
Depth buffer does not work by default. You must enable it setting from ReShade UI -> Addons. Check Generic Depth and Copy depth buffer before clear operations tick boxes. If you don't enable it, all the shaders works but sharpening is added to the whole image.
DOF preset
I added a secondary preset, that has the same effects, but also includes DOF effect. If you add shortcut for switching profiles, you can easily change to photographer mode.
Change Log
1.2
- Small adjustments to shader parameters. Increases overall lightness.
- Fixed a wrong texture file name, that were used in LUT filter.
- Bloom shader is now enabled by default.
- Previous .ini file is included in the zip
1.1
- Removed library shader files from the zip to prevent adding duplicate instances.
- Fixed wrong technology name in the preset, causing eye adoption shader were not enabled.
- Fixed a bug in luma detection curve calculation. (Delay parameter affected the curve)
- More luma detection adjustment parameters.
- Changes to installation instructions.
1.0
henry1
infectedmushroom
Absolute best preset overall. If you try it, there's no going back!
sonicviz
Unfortunately I've had to conclude this causes startup instability in MSFS and have sadly had to delete it.
I also use a modified version of https://flightsim.to/file/20557/finallight-reshade-preset-realistic-colors-and-tone-fixes and ran quite extensive tests for a couple of days with both while I was testing my new app. FInal light only uses 1 LUT FX to get rid of that horrible green tint, so is pretty lightweight, and does not impact loading at all. With this, however, I experienced a number of loading crashes, higher than 50% chance, and sometimes crashes in sim. I concluded it was due to this, as without it I'm back to normal stability (if that's a thing with MSFS haha!).
I love the concept, but if it kills the sim, it has to go.
Please don't shoot the messanger. Just warning you, and I think you need to do some more stability testing.
shortfinal author
Thanks for information. Do you use Steam or MS Store version? I know FinalLight's preset. It's great and I have been using it. It's really based on a single LUT which is very lightweight. I have quite powerful machine and thus unable to test with lower end systems, as well as MS Store version.
I am wondering if something else causes in stability than performance issues. Version incompability or something maybe? Have you cleared shader caches via ReShade UI and/or via Explorer's Disk Cleanup?
However, I am trying to write a whole new custom shader for eye adaption that uses LUT. It's more efficient, but lacks of fine tuning possibilites. Other shader's I've added like DOF and LumaSharpening cannot be done via LUTs, so they will always be eating some GPU power. Gamut fix could be converted to LUT, I think. It does some funky cross-colorspaces calculatiotions that may hit performance. Gamut fix is really the thing that removes the green tint for me, resulting very similar look than FinalLight.
1 years ago
shortfinal
Pro Tip: If you are not afraid of over exposure and want more light at day time you can crank up the 'Luma Input Gain' slider in EyeAdoption_modded shader. Try values 0.5..065. That does not affect dark condition but make your day really shine.
tonaz
24 days ago
EllisMT
Hey man, I can rate this yet but if i could it would be 5 stars, It looks amazing, It makes the sim look so much more natural and visually pleasing, normally reshade presets are either too vibrant or too sharp, this is neither, It's just right
sonicviz
Thanks, nice. However, your presets are still referencing PreprocessorDefinitions=fLUT_TextureName="LUT-ReduceUglyGreen.png",L but the texture is LUT-RemoveUglyGreen
Of course the LUT is not going to work!
shortfinal author
Thanks for information. Going to fix it in the next update.
2 years ago
SalemLeChat
don't work. steam MSFS
shortfinal author
Hi! There were couple of issues with the initial version. I uploaded a new version, if you want to try that, but remember to delete duplicate shaders, mentioned in installation instructions.
2 years ago
shortfinal
There are some issues in the initial release. Shader may appear duplicate with double effect, if shaders were already installed in different folders. Other issues is with bug related to curve parameter. If delay is set over 1.6, image get too bright. Trying to fix these asap.