Thanks for the feedback.
I found it really strange that some users report the brightness to be too high yet others told me it's perfect and the mod makes the colors come up.
So I did a research on the topic.
It turns out that:
- The mod works differently on different hardware and is mostly affected by resolutions.
- Each monitor type responds differently.
- Although not recommended, most people crank their monitor settings (brightness, contrast, luma) way up to 100%, for a record I use 50% brightness and 100% contract but on others even lower values, this helps produce natural light. There is a tool to help you automatically adjust these for your monitor and make it's colors corrected, more info bellow.
- Different GPUs behave differently with the mod.
I am currently working on v6 for PR, this time around I am testing the mod on multiple monitors, different resolutions etc. I've found a solution but it needs to be balanced further and this takes time.
Until v6 is out, here's what you can and should do in general sense:
- Lower your ingame brightness to default.
- Lower your monitor brightness (if it's maxed out) to optimal one.
- Use RealDust switches to turn items that are annoying to you, you can find these in the main thread. Most affecting are bloom and flares/glares.
- Switch the RD mod in-game off using ScrollLock key when you don't want it to interfere with your interface.
There's a gadget that can automatically balance your monitor settings and profiles for you. These are pretty cheap to buy. I've used some on my designer monitors on the workstation as this job requires extreme precision but it never hurts to do this yourself too. While pricing can range from 20 USD to 300 USD, you don't really need expensive one, just the most basic thing will do.
They are called Color Calibrators, but good ones can fix your brightness and contrast too -
https://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1 ... alibration
Here's how it works -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RUVrRM0Njk
If you're on the budget, there are plenty of video tutorials that show you how to calibrate specific monitor settings.
I would also like to explain how RealDust (ReShade) works, in most plain laymans terms possible:
RealDust does not interact with 3D objects in the game at all, what it does is it intercepts frames your GPU has pre-rendered but not "uploaded" to your PC and it applies various calculations, overlays and then uploads the frame for display. Since it doesn't interact with 3D space, it uses pixels to react, here's examples.
For bloom - RD goes "hey I see a white pixel brighter than usual, does it have friends? If yes, let me make it glow"
For sharpening - RD goes "hey there are random dark pixels, do they have too many friends? If not, let me give them some"
For color correction - RD goes "hey this yellow color is too yellow and contrasted, looks cartoony, let me replace it with sandy yellow, hey this sky is too blue looks like paint and not natural sky, let me replace it with cyan-blue"
For lens flare - RD goes "hey these pixels are in center and very bright, let's add them some nice 3D effects and remove other effects until these are gone"
And so on, you get the idea. Each filter in RD (ReShade) uses multiple matrixes and calculations for every frame, thus the process is complex, however since it relies on pixel count it will be affected by your resolution hence RealDust is optimized for 720p to 1080p. Also, since RealDust relies on pixels, it cannot smartly see that you are in a bright menu it will think it's skyline or explosion, equally it cannot intelligently know you are looking at ground or sky, it relies on color patterns and settings I've made in my preset. So keep this in mind. RealDust is not fix-it-all solution but a rather one-for-all that aims to improve certain elements of your game, however this costs processing power and may not work with all game elements as a result.
I will publish v6 when it's ready.