True Color-Grading Filter / Look Up Table (LUT) Removal Mod (Needed!)

[WalteriusMaximus]

no its from the long E3 demo, its not a matter of the " wrong peoples " working on it, as much as i prefer how the old demos looks, vanilla is still fantastic, we can all critic how the game looks, what happened and whatever, but keep in mind that they did their best considering all the 3 platforms, yes they didnt deliver what they showed us, but the game is still a beast

its an incredibly complex task to make a game of this scope, let alone on 3 platforms and 2 of them being new, am sure they tried their best to deliver what they showed us, there are many proofs around that that E3 build was playable, so it wasnt all BS, shit happens !

Yes, I agree. As a whole, Witcher 3 is the best game I've ever played and I love it! Wouldn't have had 3 full playthroughs under my belt otherwise.
I'm just questioning the lighting issue in isolation. They have the tech to create an amazing game atmosphere and the appropriate lighting, but I don't think they used the tools they have at their disposal all that well. You yourself have pointed out stuff like the dynamic exposure which to me seems like a terrible design choice.
Because this is not a FPS game in which visibility is an all-important factor. instead, correct lighting simulation is much more important. so I don't think they approached this in the right way....I mean, they had it but then lost it. Anyway....

Back to my question about the images. You posted 2 images....one is from the E3 demo, and the other one? Are they both from the demo?

 

[Valas991]

Back to my question about the images. You posted 2 images....one is from the E3 demo, and the other one? Are they both from the demo?

both are from the demo (even essenthy answered, 1st sentence)
Both have the same HUD (i mean, minimap is the same, etc)

 

[WalteriusMaximus]

both are from the demo (even essenthy answered, 1st sentence)
Both have the same HUD (i mean, minimap is the same, etc)

OK. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[essenthy]

Yes, I agree. As a whole, Witcher 3 is the best game I've ever played and I love it! Wouldn't have had 3 full playthroughs under my belt otherwise.
I'm just questioning the lighting issue in isolation. They have the tech to create an amazing game atmosphere and the appropriate lighting, but I don't think they used the tools they have at their disposal all that well. You yourself have pointed out stuff like the dynamic exposure which to me seems like a terrible design choice.
Because this is not a FPS game in which visibility is an all-important factor. instead, correct lighting simulation is much more important. so I don't think they approached this in the right way....I mean, they had it but then lost it. Anyway....

Back to my question about the images. You posted 2 images....one is from the E3 demo, and the other one? Are they both from the demo?

the exposure ramping up is actually used in ALOT of games, its not wrong or anything like that, its a cheap trick but personally i dont like it, keep in mind am not a lighting artist, am pulling this out of my ass, its more a matter of taste vs tech limitation, what make me think that ther's another way of doing it was the long E3 demo wich didnt use much of that exposure trick

as for vanilla lighting, i agree that there are some issues that can make you question how did they left something like that, and my only conclusion is that they simply didnt have time to check everything else and fix it, the game got delayed 3 times i believe, at some point you gotta end the development or capput the project

since they had way more time and experience on B&W am sure you will see way less of weird lighting issues like in vanilla

 

[Guest 3841499]

I decided to try ReShade's shaders to compensate for this yellow filter and make the game look more neutral, close to the E3 2014 look. I know there are plenty of E3-Like Colors ReShade presets already available, but they mess with image depth (gamma), brightness, and contrast. I wanted my game to look as close to Vanilla as possible, but without the yellow filter or at least with reduced amount of that filter.

I created my own preset that uses only ONE shader (ColorMatrix) and simply changes the amount of R, G, and B (Red, Green, and Blue) applied to the image. Yellow is made from Red & Green, so I decreased both Red and Green by 15% (each), and raised Blue by 30% to compensate for the lost contrast & brightness caused by Red and Green 15% decrease. It worked out WONDERFULLY IMO. Its not perfect nor can I say it is superior to other available presets that mimic E3 colors, but its the best thing for those who want to maintain the original image depth (gamma), brightness, and contrast. Of course ReShade is applied to the entire image, which means some appropriately colored objects and textures will have less Red and Green applied to them.

Here's the comparison:
Original Image

My Personal E3-like ReShade Preset

What do you think? Did I succeed at making the game look more neutral without messing up other graphics aspects?


What say you? Does my preset make the game look more neutral/natural than the original game colors?

 

[ImprovizoR]

I just want to point one thing I've experienced in the Witcher 2, the feel I had in Flotsam. I was literally AFRAID, to go outside the town's gate and get slained by som kind of monster. It had it's own, unique darkish atmosphere, which I ( unfortunately ) have not experienced in The Witcher 3 which is odd, because swamps of Crookback bog is specifically the place where you would expect to feel alone and vulnerable. Later on, I installed STLM 2, it was much better there, but it still left me with the feels from vanilla.

This doesn't have anything to do with lighting. The Witcher 2 was scarier because it was a more difficult game. You didn't have Roach so you couldn't just summon him for a quick escape, Geralt had a more limited set of moves and tools and you couldn't drink potions in the middle of a battle. Not to mention that fast travel points are everywhere. All those things add to the scary atmosphere. Imagine if you were in The Witcher 3 in a middle of Crookback bog without Roach to help you get out of there faster and without any potions and healing items and no fast travel option. Just you surrounded by necrophages. It's the same reason Dark Souls games are scary. Dark Souls 3 looks freakin' gorgeous, but when you think about how easy it is to be killed in that game and to lose all those souls it becomes scary.
Maybe with the new patch and the option to turn on level scaling the game will be tougher and appear scarier as a result.

 

[Guest 3841499]

its impossible to make the current game looks like the E3 demo (2014 build to be precise since thats the most reasonable example, trailers are out of question ) even by tweaking the tonemapping operator and colorgrading directly from the game, and sweetfx and resahde are already out because they influence everything else everywhere and dont work per zone/region

outside of assets and art direction difference ( wich were vastly suprior imo ), there are two factors that made the game look way better than what it is right now

1) the lighting system

the lighting was simply of higher quality, they had dynamic IBL ( many interviews confirming that ) wich looks miles ahead, more realistic, more ambient and has excellent lighting retention in shadowed areas, this is the first thing that give a tone to any object that is hit by light, wich mean if you change it, everything change


2) tonemapping

back then, dynamic exposure use was very minimal, because the lighting in shadowed area was good, now because the lighting is so weak in shadowed areas they abuse it literally everywhere, as soon as you enter a slightly dark/shadowed area the exposure goes up to help light up the scene ( instead of having normal light lighting up the scene ), BUT since geralt already has so much fake lighting on him it make him pop up ALOT, technically its understandable that they cant check everywhere and tune those parameters to fix geralt poping since its automated most likely, but its a big issues for me

her's an example :

View attachment 41311

as you can see in the horizon and in the scene in general the exposure is normal because the natural light is enough to light up the scene, but if you take vanilla and go to the exact same place you will see exposure goes up, and stuff in horizon getting crushed ( clouds/object ), thats what dynamic exposure does, and its used everywhere

then you have tonemapping curve wich give the image a certain " tone ", they deliberately made it look more gritty/old/yellowish and used or i dont know what word to use here, rather than more natural/neutral like the E3 demo

so what you can do to make it like E3 anyways ? the first and easiest step is to make tonemapping curve to more neutral wich is doable and should not break too many things but its extremly complexe and tiresome to tweak with the current modding tool, then change the colorgrading parameter to neutral too, then you will have something that " imitate " E3 demos

i personally gone to the point of completely removing the dynamic exposure, wich make shadowed areas look washed out but i still prefer that than the dynamic exposure and characters poping out like they have an invisible projector on them

Are you releasing any mods that remove the dynamic exposure? I would like to see some shots of how the game looks like after your modding. To offset the washed out dark areas, you can use Atmospheric Nights (to greatly increase night-time darkness) and/or calibrate your monitor to Power-Law 2.4 gamma. I personally use BT.1886 and it looks perfect in Witcher 3.

Is The Witcher 3 "Dynamic Exposure" the same thing ENB creator calls "Adaptation" ? I think a proper ENB for Witcher 3 would allow us to disable those yellow filters....

BTW, what do you think of my attempts to remove the yellow filter (check my previous post with screenshots)?

 

[essenthy]

Are you releasing any mods that remove the dynamic exposure? I would like to see some shots of how the game looks like after your modding. To offset the washed out dark areas, you can use Atmospheric Nights (to greatly increase night-time darkness) and/or calibrate your monitor to Power-Law 2.4 gamma. I personally use BT.1886 and it looks perfect in Witcher 3.

Is The Witcher 3 "Dynamic Exposure" the same thing ENB creator calls "Adaptation" ? I think a proper ENB for Witcher 3 would allow us to disable those yellow filters....

BTW, what do you think of my attempts to remove the yellow filter (check my previous post with screenshots)?

it will be part of STLM 2.2, ther's no point to release a mod that only remove it since you have to compensate with other things for the lighting loss in dark areas, vanilla is already very dark washed out by itself, so removing the dynamic exposure without compensating will make things just worse

am not sure what does Adaptation mean in ENB terms since i dont use those, but it might be, you can think of it as " light power " the more you increase it the more everything around in the scene is brighter and shinier, even bloom get triggered because the white points on object become more powerful and reach the bloom threshold, i dont think an ENB could help W3, since ENB are basically a deeper integration of reshade/sweetfx, you are still just " adding " stuff on top of the original image and not properly modifying its original parameters, at least thats my understanding of ENB

also to understanding dynamic exposure with a simple example, take a camera and start filming around ( i think it work even with phones camera ) as soon as you enter a dark area the exposure ramp up, but as soon you get out of it you will see crapload of light and screen become very bright, thats because the dynamic exposure was adjusting itself to the new lighting around, since it was using high values from the previous shadowed areas, in the brighter area everything is too bright so you have to wait a little bit for the exposure to adjust itself

 

[vesemas228]

I was happy with the results of

#define RGB_Lift float3(1.149, 1.149, 1.149)

in reshade. See my screenshots in the screenshots thread.

Yeah the vanilla exposure is horrible. If you use reshade for anything its to fix the exposure. Im pretty sure a balance between the in game gamma slider and the tonemap setting is also needed if you're messing with the color.

My favourite scene to test, ie, the most offensive exposure ive seen, is crows perch on a sunny day and the area around the run down fishing town just south of it. I've managed to make those scenes barely acceptable..

Thinking about it kaer morhen is also pretty dramatic, will wonder over there again sooner or later.

EDIT: My claim to exposure repair.

 

[Guest 3841499]

I ended up with a very nice set of mods that now provide graphics closely resembling one from 2014 trailer.., I THINK.

I used:
- ULM Redux mod (CSLM / Cut-Scene Lighting Mod Preset), but it made the sky and distant objects too foggy bright bloom
- Extended View Distance mod, which corrected the issue with ULM Redux foggy bright bloom, but distant LOD popping was too visible in the distance
- Increased LOD Distance mod improved the Extended View Distance mod's overly visible LOD popping

Now the game looks a LOT more neutral to me. Now I just have to wait for the upcoming DoF mod to get rid of nasty naked singular trees and objects in the far distance.


EDIT:
RGB_Lift float3 still alters all the colors in the game, making some more neutral and others less neutral.

 

[vms82]

No reshade mod would improve the lacking lighting systems without breaking it elsewhere sadly its just unfixable, unless someone figure out a way to adjust the lighting/colors pallete for the entire day/night cycle for the different ingame zones that use different lighting.And even if someone finds a way to do it it will take to much time to make it right for the entire game thus not worth wasting his time moding that coz the replayability of the game is not great and not worth the time effort put into that specific mod.Lets just hope there will be enchanced version of the game that will implement more assets little redesign better lighting system and optimisations overall during the entire game, but it will not happen imo since they say they will not work on withcer serries anymore aside from bug fixes.

 

[essenthy]

if someone is really motivated to edit the colograding by hand directly thru envs, her's what to do :

- disable balancemap

- now that blance map is disable you dont need any of the settings related to it ( lerp, amount, post brightness )

- level midtones is basically contrast

- level highlight increase/decrease highlights on object that shine/have highlight

- midtones parameters should be related to level midtones , preferably leave that default

- level shadows, is for shadows balancing, fairly straightforward

- now the fun part is the parametric balance, changing those values is very visible especially the high part, it affect all of the image, if for example you make a yellow tone on parametric balance high part ( something like 255.255.210) all of the image in game will have a yellow tone

- parametric mid blance control the mid balance, this is something fairly complicated to tune, if changed it too much it break all of the mid tones in game

- parametric low is for the low end, change made to this are hardly visible in game, they should be in part with the MID and HIGH parameter

remember this is without using balancemap, balancemap basically from my very basic understanding are " pre made " colorgrading, they tone the image in a certain way, even shadows/exposure, they are located in different places in the game files structure, balance0 is for night time, balance1 is for day time, there are different balancemap for DAY and NIGHT time, the game has many balance map, so you can try combining different balance maps with different settings, that alone should give you an idea about the limitless possibilities ( and the time it take! ) but very few settings will give " usable " parameters

alos everything here have no influence on other parameters colors, this is just ON TOP of everything else, so for example instead of changing the sky colors to blue/yellow, you can leave it blue but use the parametric balance to add a slight yellow tone at the end

now this is just the color balance parameters, tone mapping have also a big influence on how the scene look, if you dont want to break the game preferably leave the tone mapping parameter as default, editing it is fairly complicated and most of the time not needed, if you do want to change that start with TonemapCurveParameter

 

[BialyWilkk]

VANILLA

STLM + 70% reduced distance fog + my own Reshade color correction, one of the main goals was to get proper rich blues and remove some of the pink tint on clouds

 

[Guest 3841499]

if someone is really motivated to edit the colograding by hand directly thru envs, her's what to do :

- disable balancemap

- now that blance map is disable you dont need any of the settings related to it ( lerp, amount, post brightness )

- level midtones is basically contrast

- level highlight increase/decrease highlights on object that shine/have highlight

- midtones parameters should be related to level midtones , preferably leave that default

- level shadows, is for shadows balancing, fairly straightforward

- now the fun part is the parametric balance, changing those values is very visible especially the high part, it affect all of the image, if for example you make a yellow tone on parametric balance high part ( something like 255.255.210) all of the image in game will have a yellow tone

- parametric mid blance control the mid balance, this is something fairly complicated to tune, if changed it too much it break all of the mid tones in game

- parametric low is for the low end, change made to this are hardly visible in game, they should be in part with the MID and HIGH parameter

remember this is without using balancemap, balancemap basically from my very basic understanding are " pre made " colorgrading, they tone the image in a certain way, even shadows/exposure, they are located in different places in the game files structure, balance0 is for night time, balance1 is for day time, there are different balancemap for DAY and NIGHT time, the game has many balance map, so you can try combining different balance maps with different settings, that alone should give you an idea about the limitless possibilities ( and the time it take! ) but very few settings will give " usable " parameters

alos everything here have no influence on other parameters colors, this is just ON TOP of everything else, so for example instead of changing the sky colors to blue/yellow, you can leave it blue but use the parametric balance to add a slight yellow tone at the end

now this is just the color balance parameters, tone mapping have also a big influence on how the scene look, if you dont want to break the game preferably leave the tone mapping parameter as default, editing it is fairly complicated and most of the time not needed, if you do want to change that start with TonemapCurveParameter

Has anyone managed to accomplish this thus far?