ENBs and color accuracy

[roylapoutre]

Hi everyone!

 

I wanted to have some recommandation from people who actually understand the difference between color accuracy and color saturation or vibrancy.

 

I always see people talking about oversaturation and how it can kill the realistic feeling of the game and ruin the lore, but actually, high saturated colors are important to get this natural realistic feeling with an ENB. But it needs to go with color accuracy.

 

An ENB like Realvision is extremely saturated but the colors are way off, too fantasy, too cartoonish. It's really distracting IMO. And from what I saw, all ENBs are either a bit more accurate in terms of color but lack saturation, or nicely saturated but with awful color accuracy making them too cartoonish...

 

Since I don't have quite the time to test every ENB out there, I reach out to you guys. What is, in your opinion, the most "realistic" ENBs that produce both accurate colors and pleasant color saturation?

 

The first screenshot on the Skyrim WIP 2016 mod page is leaning towards a nice look IMO http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/60150/?

Edited November 14, 2016 by roylapoutre

[panurgy]

This is a tough call. I'm not sure if there's a preset that fits exactly what you're looking for.

 

Rudy is a great preset. Also look at his "Somber Enderal" screenshot links near the bottom of the Rudy page. Those might fit what you're looking for, but I think it's still in beta.

 

I love K ENB, and the related Kountervibe, but they're more fantasy than you're looking for.

 

I think NLA (Natural Lighting & Atmospherics) is amazing in a different way, but fits into your undersaturated category.

 

Rampage might be a fit. It's a bit hard on framerates. Also, Rampage uses the HD6 bloom shader, which is more stylistic than realistic. That might bother you. You can easily turn down or turn off the DoF if you want, so I don't think that's an issue.

 

As a last desperate attempt, maybe Opethfeldt? It hasn't been updated in years, so it might look a little different on the latest ENB binaries, unless it's tweaked. It looks oversaturated to me, but the contrast is more restrained and realistic than RealVision.

 

Also: Snowfall ENB. This is the only one I haven't tried. I've been planning on checking it out for a while. This might actually be the best fit for what you're looking for.

[roylapoutre]

Thanks for the comprehensive list! You actually suggested a lot of ENBs that I've never heard of, that's nice. I know it's a tough call, but it's really frustrating to be left with this choice between more realistic colors but washed up look and nice vivid colors but cartoonish look... I want to try and see if it's possible to create a custom ENB with the desired colors but it seems like a LOT of work.

 

Anyway, K ENB felt really weird from the screenshots and videos I've seen, never been a fan of it.

I tried NLA recently, and it was too little of an improvement over vanilla colors. Washed up category for me.

I discovered Snowfall ENB recently and it actually retained my attention even if it felt a bit washed up too. But it's not compatible with Climate of Tamriel, my favorite weather mod. I might need to overlook this and try it anyway ^^

 

The other ones are new to me, I'll check them out.

 

Thanks again for the great list!