zztraider

Great tip on the HDR stuff. I've been trying that out for the last day or so, and it looks like it helps a lot. Currently, I still have my ENB changes in place, but turned Cathedral Weathers back to Normal for nights and interiors. Nights may actually still be a little too bright, so I think the next step is to try reverting my ENB changes and just change Cathedral Weathers interiors back to Brighter and see how that looks.

The former. The Sunrise through Sunset AmbientLightingIntensity* settings ranged from 0.9 to 1.0 originally, and now range from 1.1 to 1.2 locally. (There may be one or two exceptions, but from memory, most of them followed that pattern and ended up in the listed range.) The AmbientLightingIntensityNight settings ranged from 0.6 to 0.7 initially, and now range from 0.95 to 1.05 depending on the weather. That said, I think someone that understands more of these settings and how they fit together could probably come up with a better overall solution. Particularly since I made the ENB adjustments in addition to the Cathedral Weathers changes.

Alright, I think I've got everything into a state I can work with. Going to record what I did in case it ends up being helpful to anyone stumbling on this thread later. I played around with the settings mentioned for a good while. The SKYLIGHT settings didn't seem to noticeably affect things, so I ended up giving up on those. The AmbientLightingIntensity* settings did seem to help, but I had some trouble finding appropriate settings that made nights bright enough without taking those intensities above the daytime stuff. (Based on how those values are set up, I'm making an assumption that it's effectively lerping between those set points as the day progresses, so a Night value that's higher than Sunrise and Sunset would potentially cause some odd transitions.) On a lark, I decided to try the other STEP ENB settings to see if that did anything useful for me. In particular, I knew by this point that I had the perf headroom to go up to Heavy without losing too much framerate. Without any other changes, switching from Light to Heavy made nights far closer to being bearable, though I did not investigate the differences between them to try to understand why. With that change in place, I was able to get appropriate lighting by increasing the exterior AmbientLightIntensity* settings (except Night) by 0.2, AmbientLightIntensityNight by 0.35, and setting AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay/Night to 1.25 each. I also switched Cathedral Weathers to Brighter for both Interiors and Nocturnal. At this point, I think my only real complaint is that torches don't seem to provide as much light as I'd expect, but it sounds like that's on the list for the next guide update, so I'll just look forward to that change. Many thanks to both z929669 and druisiuil for their contributions here.

Well, that's confusing. But it does look like the files the guide tells me to take from that download have the same timestamps as the ones I already have, so it looks like I managed to catch the latest update anyway.

I've double checked my BethINI settings, and everything appears correct. I'm already using what appears to be the latest ENB binary, 0.488. I've told GeForce Experience to not try to optimize my games, though based on the settings it's suggesting for Skyrim, I'm not sure it was ever actually modifying anything. Are there other settings you suggest checking there or in the NVIDIA Control Panel? I don't see anything super obvious that doesn't seem like it'll just globally affect every application I use. For the AmbientLightingIntensity* settings, is it reasonable to go above 1.0, or will that cause other issues? It looks like AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay is already set to 1.0 in all the weathers, so using that to brighten up the interiors a bit will be difficult if it needs to be clamped 0 to 1. Thank you for all your assistance, by the way. Playing around with some settings a bit, it does look like this will eventually get me to a good spot after some trial and error.

Everything should be exactly as instructed unless I just screwed up somewhere. No intentional deviations, at any rate. I did turn the settings up to Ultra during the perf testing phase, since it was suggested for high enough framerates, but I did go back and should have verified/reapplied all of the changes in BethINI mentioned at the start of the guide. I do generally agree with you about those screenshots -- it's too bright without ENB, but a bit too dark with it. Here's some new screenshots with the Brightness setting turned all the way up (it was defaulted to right in the middle of the slider previously). I also adjusted Cathedral Weathers to the "Brighter" Interior Vision option. Riverwood Inn ENB No ENB Riverwood Trader ENB No ENB Riverwood outside No Torch ENB No ENB Torch ENB No ENB While the differences between brightness settings seem very apparent when ENB is turned off, I can't really tell much difference when ENB is turned on. That's particularly surprising for these new interior shots, where there's both the brightness and the Cathedral Weathers setting changes that ought to be brightening things up. Does that suggest that something might be wrong with my ENB install? If not, are there ENB settings you would recommend tweaking to try to brighten things up a bit to something that feels more playable to me?

Sorry for the double post -- I couldn't get it to let me upload additional images while editing, but thought some additional data points I ran across might be helpful. Here's another set of images, north of the Penitus Occulatus Output near Dragon Bridge. It's a bit cloudy, but still a rather sunny day, so the landscape and house seems awful dark for the weather when the ENB is enabled. With ENB on: With ENB turned off:

I've recently followed the STEP guide v2.2.0 with ENB (using the STEP Light settings). I've followed the mod settings as listed, leaving Cathedral Weathers at its defaults. Everything appears to be working fine, except the game is surprisingly dark. Just from what I've seen in Riverwood, I'm uncertain how I'd be able to meaningfully see at all to play in a dungeon. Here are a number of screenshots (which I've resized down to 1080p, but I can provide the original 1440p images if needed). The first screenshot in each pair is with ENB enabled, the second is with ENB disabled. The Riverwood Inn. Note how the door to actually get out of the room is basically invisble. It's still hard to see without the ENB, but not impossible. ENB No ENB Inside the Riverwood Trader. I can barely make out that there are shelves along the wall. ENB No ENB Outside on the road at night ENB No ENB Same spot but with a torch out. The torch seems to help a little, but not nearly as much as I was hoping when the ENB is enabled. ENB No ENB Does this match with expectations? I also tried altering the Cathedral Weathers settings to Brighter interiors and nights, but the difference seemed very small. As feedback for the guide, it might be helpful to provide reference images with some common expected settings (i.e., an No ENB install, ENB install at each tier) so it's easier to figure out if what I'm seeing matches expectations or if something went wrong in my installation. Otherwise, it's a fantastic guide and the instructions were easy to follow.