P3Dv5.3 with EA - how to remove colour cast?

[Rogen 1,095]

I'd say give ReShade a trial - noting ReShade is not RDShade.

In anycase the two can complement each other as ReShade runs outside the sim and can be called up and adjusted on the fly so to speak.

And ReShade is free.

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/641584-bloom-in-v54-doyou-use-it-above-0/?do=findComment&comment=5057743

I've been using it for years, and in other games besides flight sims.

Cheers

[Ray Proudfoot 9,028]

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

Ray, does your first screenshot have cloud cover?  If those are clear skies, and it's not very early or late in the day, then your scenery looks too dark.  I don't see the overly bluish tint.

Yes, quite a lot as it matched that at the time of my friend’s photo. Around 11:00. It’s more apparent on a larger screen.

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

There's a guy who made a preset for RDshade where the bluish tint is actually increased a bit over the stock setting, as well as a number of other tweaks like brightening everything up a bit.  He claims that his settings are based on his real life experience as a commercial pilot and that this is the best we can have with P3Dv5 and EA. He also increases the sim HDR brightness to 1.25.

I’ll experiment but if I increase brightness the clouds will whiteout. Saturation wasn’t touched as it makes colours too strong.

At least with RDShade I can try other people’s settings and learn from them.

If I uninstall ENVSHADE it requires me to uninstall and reinstall the client as it changes default files. Does RDShade have the option to lighten cockpits?

[Ray Proudfoot 9,028]

37 minutes ago, Rogen said:

I'd say give ReShade a trial - noting ReShade is not RDShade.

In anycase the two can complement each other as ReShade runs outside the sim and can be called up and adjusted on the fly so to speak.

And ReShade is free.

I’ve been impressed with your posted images. Does it require a lot of knowledge to get good results?

Is it advisable to run two shader programs? But given it’s free that might be the best place to start. Thanks.

[okupton 310]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Does RDShade have the option to lighten cockpits?

Yes, it does.

[Ray Proudfoot 9,028]

18 hours ago, polosim said:

Hi Ray, I'm curious about this, which leads me to ask what settings you use to:

WEATHER: Rate at which weather change over time.

I think that could be the cause of the lack of your clear skies and excessive haze.

P.s: Image is for purposes of location of the aforementioned setting.

Hi @polosim, that option is set to "No change", same as yours.

I've been reading through the ASP3D user manual this morning. Apparently if you have EA enabled there's no benefit to having ASCA installed. I didn't know that. Have others using EA also stopped using it?

"Prevent ASP3D EA Volumetric cloud control is enabled, Enable detailed EA clouds is disabled in accordance with the manual.

Visibility seems okay. It's just this bluish cast which according to Bob is difficult if not impossible to remove with the commercial toold available.

So, for now, I'm going to prevent ASCA from running and assess the situation.

[kmax59 213]

19 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Bob Scott, if you couldn’t resolve the problem I’m not sure I can. There are a few ENV products (why not just one?) so did you try ENVTEX or ENVPLUS?

I’m keen to hear from @kmax59, the author of the ENV series as to whether any of his products can remove the blue cast.

I can live with the lack of really clear skies with the excessive haze but when you have a calibrated monitor that should be showing P3D to its best the blue cast is unacceptable.

Hi Ray,

Envtex will not be very useful to decrease this blue tint, it's main purpose is to enhance textures and special effects, it also adds auroras. I could not tell it's useless, it definitely adds some additional details, but it won't be helpful for what you are looking for in this post.

That being said, Envplus definitely is what you are looking for. 

 

21 hours ago, dave2013 said:

I had ENVplus as well and wasn't impressed with it.

Some of this stuff is subjective, but I must correct one thing:

ENVplus does not have more options than RDshade.

Dave

There is definitely something we failed at when communicating about Envplus, because Envplus does a lot more than RDshade ! 

It may not have more options, but the included automated features are far more advanced, and the main reason here is that Envplus directly touches the EA shaders, which RDshade doesn't. Many many shader parameters in Envshade and Envplus reacts directly to the current environment (time of day, weather, visibility, altitude, location... etc).

I'm not sure why it's a popular belief that Envplus does not do more. I found some Envshade code that was simply copied/pasted in RDshade files with the copyright text, I contacted someone from RDpreset in the past to get this removed, someting was supposed to be done but since then the guys disappeared from my contacts. There's no doubt that RDshade was basically done by retro-engeneering as per the comments that can be found in their shader files. That was nothing absolutely major so I decided not to fight (again) but you can bet this is quite frustrating to hear that our product is less advanced when you know such things.

From a technical point of view, Envplus definitely surpassed RDshade as it affects EA shaders, and it's the only shader software that currently can do that.

In a nutshell yes, you'll be able to reduce the blue tint, but not to remove it entirely. You'll probably have to try different settings to find the right spot but overall the default preset should be a good starting point.

Edited March 1 by kmax59

[IanHarrison 524]

Very disappointed in Reshade. Small postage stamp interface in the P3D settings screen, which can't be enlarged to read anything and takes for ever to do apparently nothing, as there is no progress indicator.  

Will not go down that route.

[polosim 857]

26 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

that option is set to "No change", same as yours.

Hi, Ray!
I used to have it in that setting (No Change) and I suffered from the partially covered skies and excessive haze. Then I changed the setting by moving it two clicks to the right with EA ON and the whole problem ended.

Maybe this information will help you improve your colors and immersion.

Edited March 1 by polosim

[srcooke 52]

37 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Apparently if you have EA enabled there's no benefit to having ASCA installed

That will depend upon whether you are using volumetric clouds or not, without then asca will be used with enhanced atmospherics.

[Ray Proudfoot 9,028]

57 minutes ago, kmax59 said:

That being said, Envplus definitely is what you are looking for.

In a nutshell yes, you'll be able to reduce the blue tint, but not to remove it entirely. You'll probably have to try different settings to find the right spot but overall the default preset should be a good starting point.

Hi Maxime, thanks for that useful info. No one knows the utility as well as the author. I wonder if you could post two images before and after applying the correction to reducr the blue cast. It's disappointing it can't be eliminated. I'm happy to buy EnvPlus if your screenshots convince me. 😊

42 minutes ago, polosim said:

Hi, Ray!
I used to have it in that setting (No Change) and I suffered from the partially covered skies and excessive haze. Then I changed the setting by moving it two clicks to the right with EA ON and the whole problem ended.

Maybe this information will help you improve your colors and immersion.

I tried that change but it made no diffference. I looked in the ASP3D manual for this setting. I always thought it had to be set to off otherwise it could interfere with ASP3D.

30 minutes ago, srcooke said:

That will depend upon whether you are using volumetric clouds or not, without then asca will be used with enhanced atmospherics

Then the manual needs correcting as this is taken from it...

"Note that ASCA is has no effect or benefit when using the EA mode of P3D v5
(Enhanced Atmospherics). If you are using only EA mode, we recommend that
ASCA be uninstalled entirely."

So as I don't enable Volumetric clouds I can leave ASCA alone. Great!

[Beardyman 608]

2 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Very disappointed in Reshade. Small postage stamp interface in the P3D settings screen, which can't be enlarged to read anything and takes for ever to do apparently nothing, as there is no progress indicator. 

Apparently something is very wrong on your side - never had described issues

[kmax59 213]

Here you go @Ray Proudfoot

First shot is the default Envplus setting, second shot is with horizon haze set at 0.6.
Just a small correction to my previous post: you can indeed change the tint of the atmospheric tint added by Envshade/plus but not exactly the tint of the EA haze as it is also linked to the sky color so I had to reduce the impact of the changes on the EA haze to prevent weird sky colours. Reducing the strenght of the haze still helps a lot though as you can see:

Having a look back at the files gave me a few ideas to explore though, so I'll see if something can be tweaked further.

 

Edited March 1 by kmax59

[Ray Proudfoot 9,028]

@kmax59, thanks Maxime. That’s a decent improvement in both sky colour and less haze resulting in slightly more intense and truer ground colours.

I look forward to seeing what further improvements you can make. 👍

[Rogen 1,095]

On 3/1/2024 at 8:12 AM, Ray Proudfoot said:

Does it require a lot of knowledge to get good results?

Is it advisable to run two shader programs?

Hi Ray,

The main trick is to workout what shaders you want and then remove the rest (I move to a alternate folder), this is because there are many many shaders and more = more load and shader compiling time.

That's why my pic only shows a few enabled and some others I'm trialing the effectiveness of.

Also you'll need an entry in your Prepar3D.cfg, note it's only the user interface where the entry was created by LM specificly for the user of third party reshaders.

[USERINTERFACE]
// Set UIHardwareAcceleration from True (the default) to False to enable reshade use.
UIHardwareAcceleration=False

There are so many shaders it can be a little overwhelming at first but if you go by what I'm using in my pic

It's mostly sliders for adjustments with checkboxes to enable/disable a shader and you can assign a key combo to disable/enable the shaders completely for a before/after viewing.

You can also enable a FPS counter and manage screen shots directly via reshade.

Use really just takes a willingness to have a play.

Cheers

[Rogen 1,095]

10 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Very disappointed in Reshade. Small postage stamp interface in the P3D settings screen, which can't be enlarged to read anything and takes for ever to do apparently nothing, as there is no progress indicator.  

Will not go down that route.

Not sure by what you mean ?

ReShade doesn't have an interface in the P3D settings screen.

There will be a need for the below Prepar3D.cfg entry.

[USERINTERFACE]
// Set UIHardwareAcceleration from True (the default) to False to enable reshade use.
UIHardwareAcceleration=False

And there are a few things to configure which a first run tutorial should run through.

The ReShade UI looks like the pic in the line below, where I've assigned to the TAB key for openng.

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/641584-bloom-in-v54-doyou-use-it-above-0/?do=findComment&comment=5057743

Cheers