aktillum

Imaginator seems like a very useful tool for cleaning up any "color tint" that users don't like in vanilla Skyrim. Here's a screenshot comparison https://imgur.com/a/WYyBTwx . The first is default STEP setup (Cathedral Weathers, Heavy ENB). The 2nd is with Imaginator enabled. Through the MCM menu I just increased "Sky" and color vividry by a couple points. Cathedral Weathers can sort of do the same thing in its own MCM Menu, but in a more limited way. Imaginator didn't touch the overall brightness of the game, it just added some more vibrant colors to the generally "greyscale" textures of Skyrim. Its a lot more easily configurable than ENB, and doesn't conflict with it. I'm mentioning this because I think it could mentioned in the STEP guide as an "optional" add-on for final post-processing touchups. Just something like "If the ENB preset is too dark for you or increasing brightness reveals Skyrim's ugly grey filters, try Imaginator"

I understand what you mean. I think in some cases, we're using "brightness" and "color tinting" interchangeably. Vanilla Skyrim has 1) Overly brightness, but also 2) A native "grey" color overlay tint. When I say "Skyrim is natively dark", what I really mean to say is, "Skyrim is natively bright, but has low contrast and grey tinting". Its a bleak world with muddy, greyish textures. If you jack up the brightness, the world gets brighter, but also greyer. Everything gets washed out in a foggy grey haze, compared to a more "tropical" color vibrancy like Far Cry 3. Cathedral Weathers seek to blend the natural bleak colors of Skyrim a bit better. It even comes with a "Sombre" toggle for even more bleakness. Other weather mods do the opposite and make everything more vibrant and colorful. So what's happening in many cases is people are complaining ENB is too dark. But when they brighten the game, they then complain it's too washed out or grey-looking, which is Skyrim's natural look. Because that's why ENB darkens everything, to sort of hide Skyrim's bleak muddy textures in shadows etc. This is where a lot of people would actually do better with a customized LUT, instead of trying to tweak everything in ENB GUI for personal preference. When people say "ENB is too dark", what they tend to mean is "ENB darkens the already greyscale-as-fark Skyrim graphics, and I was expecting some vivid saturated colorful eyecandy".

Right, it's specific to how good your monitor is calibrated. But when it comes to Skyrim, a good "desktop calibration" isn't necessarily a good "Skyrim calibration". This is why a lot of Reddit threads are "why is Skyrim ENB so dark?". And then all the replies will be like, "Did you try adjusting ((esoteric line in the ENB config))?" or "Oh yeah, ENBs are always super-dark, that's why I stopped using them". Because everyone has a different setup and expects ENB to just work out of the box. And tweaking ENB is a major pain in the butt. This is where it becomes applicable to many others. With ENB enabled, the brightness slider in Skyrim stops working. Setgamma console command stops working. So to adjust the brightness, you have to do it through monitor or GPU settings. That's the fastest and most direct way. The catch is, Skyrim is natively dark because of its color correction. Cathedral Weathers was made to go along with Skyrim's washed out, bleak look. Its not as vivid or bright as other weather mods. It enhances Skyrim's "greyish" filter - then you slap an ENB on top of it, you've got Batman trilogy darkness. And when you increase brightness in this setup, blacks become greys because Skyrim doesn't really have HDR. So basically, people need to increase their brightness a little bit more for playing Skyrim than they would for ordinary desktop use, when it comes to Cathedral Weathers + ENB. A Chrome page with white background / black font is perfectly readable at 50% monitor brightness, anything more hurts my eyes. But 50% brightness in Skyrim with Cathedral Weathers + ENB is pitch-black at night. This means for the average user with an out-of-the-box monitor configuration, or a configuration that feels "comfortable" for web browsing, ENB is going to feel absurdly dark.

Additional notes: Some more screenshots showing (Heavy) ENB on / off at night time. Default ENB settings. For ENB off, I'm using 1.24 gamma in the Skyrim console (sg 1.24) https://imgur.com/a/F3DzbNb | https://imgur.com/a/4A6NeZf If you view those photos at default Nvidia panel brightness(50%). Its absolutely pitch black. You can't tell in the photo because you have your own monitor brightness configured. This means proper monitor calibration is highly important. The problem is that finding a comfortable brightness level for Skyrim does not mean a comfortable brightness for ordinary computer usage. Skyrim is natively darker than your desktop brightness. ENB overrides Skyrim's native gamma ((no changes are visually reflected using "sg xx" console command with ENB enabled)) afaict, the ENB preset seems to mostly be tied to weather system, which causes a lot of the issue for end-users. For example ENB shadows are too solid dark. This seems to be controlled by [Skylighting]. But you need to enable "Ignore Weather" first for [Skylighting] tweaks to have any effect. Or else it gets overridden by the Weathers effects ((a separate GUI menu)). So tweaking ENB isn't a user-friendly experience at all. Here we come to another issue. By increasing desktop brightness, we're revealing Skyrim's ugly black filter. The game's native color correction is very gloomy and washed out in a grey overtone. ENB doesn't actually do much to solve this. You can increase brightness in my Nvidia control panel or monitor settings, which would solve ENB darkness issues, but this only reveals Skyrim's horrible washed out color filtering. This is what I believe ENB authors try to hide by making everything absurdly dark, which is just exchanging one problem for another. The way to fix this would be creating a custom LUT file and Reshade. With LUT, you can basically take a screenshot in-game, then open something like Photoshop and perfectly adjust the colors / contrast / etc exactly to your preferences, and have that overriding everything. Out-of-the-box ENB preset on average monitor brightness is really too dark for many people. By "average monitor brightness" I mean what someone would comfortably set their brightness in a typical dimly-lit office room. Your monitor needs to be BRIGHT on the desktop so that Skyrim appears somewhat bright. By increasing brightness, you reveal Skyrim's horrible color filtering that ENB authors try to hide. The best remedy is a custom LUT file for final touches. In ENB it seems a bit complicated, ReShade had an easy method of editing LUT files with Photoshop and some game screenshots.

I also think brightness adaptation is implemented a bit weird. Here's comparison of looking straight forward vs. looking down at ground https://imgur.com/a/0FUpJHR

The recent update to torches for Step Patch Post Processing helped a little ((I think, I didn't compare before/after)). What we can boil this down to is a few things. 1) Desktop brightness / gamma is visually different than in-game. For best results, have a few in-game screenshots open and then tweak your display brightness (monitor settings, Nvidia panel, etc.) What will happen is that your desktop will feel super bright, while in-game it feels "normal". This is because of Skyrim's color overlays giving everything a moody, grey ambience. Back in the day the "teofis" command was used to disable Skyrim's moody camera filter, now that command breaks stuff.

Yeah of course, Riften is performance hungry. Was more curious about the 3D leaves from Cathedral's, and ENB shadow effect. But it seems ENB's shadow effect, even though its making the floating leaves problem much more obvious, doesn't actually reduce performance with those meshes. Speaking of ENB performance, maybe you can help me figure something out. Using STEP guide's "Light" preset for ENB. Enabling/disabling ENB water effect can make a 15 - 20 FPS difference in certain areas (e.g. Lake Illinalta). However, none of the ENB water effects by themselves seem to impact performance. For example these screenshots https://imgur.com/a/PQi0sSS ENB water on = 9 FPS ENB water off = 17 FPS ENB water on + all effects under [Water] disabled (distant reflection, shadows, displacement, etc) = 9 FPS Any insight? It seems ENB water being enabled purely by itself is a massive FPS drop, regardless of the actual individual water effects enabled/disabled.

Cathedral Landscapes adds 3D leaves to Riften area. Many are aware of a "floating leaves" problem which has a fix: Cathedral Landscapes - No Floating Ash Leaves However I want to note another possible problem, which is the performance impact combined with ENB. It seems like ENB treats these 3D leaves as individual objects, giving them shadows. You can see in my screenshot 1) The floating leaves problem, 2) Each 3D leaf is receiving a shadow from ENB. ENB adding shadows to literally hundreds of 3D mesh leaves doesn't sound very performance-friendly. Any ideas for a solution beyond "disable ENB in low-performance Riften areas"? The ENB setting "DetailedShadow" controls this, which is also responsible for shadows on grass. Disabling it only gives a 2FPS boost and removes shadows from ALL grass, so its not as big an issue as I thought.

Oh okay, so basically the NPCs are only using vanilla shadows for awareness? If that's the case it's no big deal. I thought it was breaking all shadow-based detection in the game, vanilla or modded.

The guide has us install both RAID and EVLaS. The RAID mod page says: "Other mods that are technically fully compatible, but worsen or break detection mechanics, EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE RAID: "EVLaS" breaks shadow based detection mechanics at dawn/dusk/night whether you use RAID or not."

MO2 reports "Battle-Light Candle Fixes" as redundant because its overwritten by ENB Light.

That'd be a cool list to have, I've been thinking about having a second Skyrim instance for experimenting with stuff outside StEP.

Just coming to say that ENB was also way too dark for me initially. One common issue is that native brightness / gamma sliders don't actually work in borderless fullscreen. Alot of people don't actually realize that. Fullscreen apps take brightness/gamma privileges from the desktop, but most folks are playing in borderless fullscreen....well, you get the picture. They sit and twiddle the brightness/gamma sliders and wonder "why the hell isn't this working?" So if you want in-game brightness sliders to have any impact, you need to be playing in exclusive fullscreen mode. And then, as others mentioned, you need to make tweaks to the ENB. That's also my complaint, but it's actually "realistic" tbf (groan, yeah I went there). But seriously, light a torch on fire in your backyard, it really only goes like <5 feet around you. Hell, even your cellphone flashlight only goes like 10 feet.

I use this mod. No problems with it. Doesn't stray from vanilla and let you get into crazy places you couldn't before, just lets you crawl under tables and stuff.

I really don't feel like re-running texgen / dyndolod so I've been on the hunt for parallax textures that can safely overwrite a full STEP guide setup. I found Cathedral Landscapes - Complex Parallax Addon which you can safely just plunk down at the bottom of a STEP list, since it just adds parallax to the existing Cathedral Textures. Anyone know similar parallax versions of stuff already in the STEP guide worth using?