Is it me or does Skyrim seem dark and kind of depressing to you?

[myrmaad]

Yeah ^ that's a great mod.

[mrspongeworthy]

The primary issue seems to be a massive overdose of what the developer thinks is "HDR", but really isn't. What they've done is exaggerate everything tremendously. Sunsets and sunrises can be super-saturated, and other areas/times of day may be super washed-out. The entire pupil-effect is also desperately overdone (personally, I think it should just be removed, since it "fights" with my real eyes which are already doing exactly the same thing as I look at my screen. I don't need a virtual version of something that is already happening. That just annoys my eyes terribly.)

 

Also, the shadows and highlights are completely overdone. Want to be able to see people's faces at all in shadow? Then you have to blow the highlights completely out. Want the highlights to look right? Then your shadows will be utterly black. It's just all overdone.

 

I use the FXAA injector and the hot-key to keep two setups - injector off for nights and dark interiors (very dark) and injector on for days and bright interiors. Then I just hit the hotkey to switch to whichever one looks best for any given scene. That helps a lot as I can have dark nights and dark caves and still have bright enough days. You'll need to play with the gamma and saturation settings in the injector config file to make this work properly for you. Also, as you increase saturation your eyes will think the picture is sharper. So I set things very dark with the injector OFF and then use the injector to brighten (using Gamma), add saturation (to compensate for Gamma setting desaturated things), and increase sharpness (to compensate for your brain thinking a scene with more contrast is sharper) when the injector is active:

 

Here are the only FXAA injector settings I use. This is with the in-game brightness setting set very low, so that when in a dark cave anywhere not near a light-source is very dark and when outdoors during the day things are far too dark and saturated. Obviously your screen will be different that mine, but maybe this will help people get started:

 

Pre-sharpen (leave it on and at default settings).

 

 

/*------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TONEMAP

------------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

#define Gamma 0.70

#define Exposure 0.00

#define Saturation 0.30 // use negative values for less saturation.

#define BlueShift 0.05 // Higher = more blue in image.

 

 

 

Everything else is commented as off,like so:

 

FILTER SELECTION

------------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

// Comment to deactivate an effect.

// Example: To disable the tonemap effect, use // in front of #define USE_TONEMAP

#define USE_PRE_SHARPEN

//#define USE_BLOOM

//#define USE_TECHNICOLOR

#define USE_TONEMAP

//#define USE_SEPIA

//#define USE_VIGNETTE

//#define USE_POST_SHARPEN

//#define USE_FINAL_LIMITER

 

 

 

(It is worth noting that turning on "technicolor" turns all blacks a shade of blue no matter what you do with the other settings. Since you can do most of the same adjustments elsewhere, I would just turn technicolor off and leave it that way in any configuration you try...)

 

Hope that helps a little.

Edited November 30, 2011 by Mr_SpongeWorthy