Using a Simple Reshade Shader to improve Colour Rendering in XPlane

[renault]

I had placed the following in a reply to a topic that OND had posted "Navajo - "Valley of the Rocks" , but I thought it might be of general interest to XPlane users. It is the simplest solution I have found to giving a very simple, but effective way to improve the colour rendering in XPlane  11. It has minimal frame rate impact

 

Hope this is of some interest

Cheers

Renault 

 

A couple observations that may help if you wish to try Reshade with XP.  XPlane uses OpenGl (at least for the present versions up to 11.26r2) for graphics rendering. When you are installing Reshade, it should automatically select OpenGl as the rendering option, but if it doesn't select it manually. I have seen folks install Reshade as DX11 on XPlane and while it works, it tends to be pretty unreliable and I think is often the reason why folks report poor performance when using Reshade with XPlane.

 

When Reshade is installed you should see the following in your Xplane directory. Of importance is that you have the opengl32.dll file present and not one named dxgi.dll. The former means that Reshade has properly configured for a Opengl rendering environment.

 

"Reshade kills my frame rates" . There are some texture shaders in the Reshade library which can do an absolutely brutal job on your frame rates. There are many others that have very minimal impact  on frame rates. Rather than download every one of the several dozen available use them selectively.

 

As an example the following Shader may be of help in fixing the "washed out" screen colours in XPlane 11.  My preferred method of colour rendering is to use colour look up tables (LUT's) with reshade (because they have no framerate impact and have an extremely large range of colour control) , however they are somewhat complicated to create and require an external program called Davinci  Resolve from www.blackmagicdesign.com . Resolve is a full fledged video editing program and has a very steep and lengthy learning curve. 

 

From a lot of experimentation, I have found that the Little_shader code works almost every bit as well as using a LUT and that is why I describe it here. 

 

 It is available from ( https://reshade.me/forum/shader-presentation/2368-hue-brightness-contrast-saturation-shift ). Highlight the code segment in the discussion  and paste it into something like notepad or notepad++.  Save it as Any name you like.fx   e.g. Little_shader.fx.

Place this file into the following reshade shader directory ( I also use the Colourfulness.fx ) from time to time which is why it is present as well.

 

 

The following two screenshots show  using the Little_shader . Increasing the colour saturation gives a much better image IMHO. As you can see , there is virtually no frame rate impact. In fact, this shader may be the only one that you need for most XPlane flights .

 

 

Little Shader OFF - Standard XPlane Colour rendering

 

Little Shader ON - Saturation increased as shown, Hue, Contrast and Brightness left at 0 settings

 

[Jack Sawyer]

Good job R!

[VH-KDK]

I like the second image.