I like what you’re going for but I think that gamma is a little too much in that image(not a crazy amount too much, just a little more then needed imo), even taking into account it being for a dark room environment. This is purely my opinion though.
Really liked the glass version you did a couple posts back!
Maybe. Please download the image and look at it full screen in a room with the lights out. Then let me know if you still feel the same way. 
(Since the gamma is a parameter, set after the images are added, the user could tweak it anyway.)
Really easy to set up too. Just my graphic as an overlay, (using the default glass overlay parameter) at 100% opacity and multiply mode.
It looks close to being alright for me if I crank my backlight all the way up, I’d maybe try changing the gamma value by about 10 or so personally.
But if it looks good to you then that’s all that matters. I do like what you’re going for with the image. I’m not trying to complain because it doesn’t suit my tastes, as I do like what you’re trying to do.
I remember playing on a CRT at night (as a kid) was the absolute best time to play on it, or at least in a dark room.
Thanks for your input!
I think I will turn the gamma up a bit. I plan on doing a usage tutorial or two in PDF for the HSM stuff, and including it in the repo. (One of these will address the night mode.) I think if I make the default settings too dark no-one will try them.
I’m going to try this conversion on a couple more images to fine tune the process. Then maybe do a night version in the repo.
No problem!
Look forward to your tutorial.
Just to be clear I think the game should be lighter. I forget how gamma works as I don’t adjust it very often.
The shader parameter I adjusted was one put in with the last release, at the bottom of the list and only adjusts the image. (At least I don’t believe it effects the game screen)
I did adjust the parameter.
Personally it looks like it’s adjusting the gamma for the game screen at least it does look like to me, as the game looks you’ve adjusted the gamma to make it darker. (This is how it looks to me when I adjust the gamma.)
I think you may be correct. I just asked HSM in his thread. If so then compensating for it will have tto be part of the tutorial.
Also, I’m not sure yet if I can do these as RA overlays. 
But I haven’t actually tried yet. 
Well it appears to adjust everything. I would have to have it on a big screen in a dark room to actually test how it feels. In that case a little less gamma on the game screen might be good.
First I think I will try adding a gamma adjustment layer to my images. Maybe I can skip adjusting this parameter in the shader.
Here’s the result…
This only requires a couple easy steps by the user, basically editing the image path and adjusting the overlay image parameters. (Edit: they will also have to set the bezel color, I will include settings info for each in the repo.)
I’ll wait for some input before going any further but, I think I feel good about this. 
One cool thing about this is that I essentially cloned the lighting effects for the background and the bezel, you can resize the bezel all you want and the results still look natural.
I am going to finish work on the night versions before doing any new graphics. Implementing them now and doing new versions on the fly will be much easier while there are still only a few images in the repo.
That looks better, imo!
Yeah it looks pretty good. I think the gamma on the bezel needs to be tweaked, I want the darkened corners of the bezel to almost disappear into the background. (Check the earlier image as reference) but it is really close.
In the end I think I’m going to take a different approach. Over the last few days I finally figured out how to reliably color my vector bezel I made for the RA Overlays. Since it was a clone of HSM’s default bezel, (More or less) it was stupid simple to lower the bezel and frame opacity to zero and tweak the screen/bezel size and curvature.
So after applying my lighting effects to one of my RA overlays…
This also means, of course, that we can have night versions of the RA overlays.
I ran into a little snag doing the colored bezels. I can’t do anything brighter than 50% gray without it getting washed out.
I will be busy for a while doing a lighter version or two of my original bezel. I am hoping one of them may be actually easier to color than the original.
@Duimon thank you for making these graphics for the shaders and overlays, I’m really digging the Dreamcast one - have not gotten around to trying the others just yet. Also thank you for providing the sources for them. It’s helping me learn more about creating them, and giving me things to learn about in GIMP as well. 
I am glad your enjoying them. Keep in mind that what you are seeing in gimp is just the raster graphics, most of the real magic is in vector. Also, I work in Adobe CC. Some of what you see , (Both vector and raster will load strangely in other software.) looks more difficult than it really is for me.
OK… who knew that designing a bezel would be so hard! 
(Besides HSM)
Here’s a few shots of colored bezels both day and night running as standard overlays.
You can use the last Night WIP SShot to get an idea how awesome they look in HSM’s shader.
These night files are huge! The lighting effect pushes the color count way up. For this reason they will only be in my HSM repo. They are the standard RA overlays with the edge drop shadow added last. (With the exception of the Wii, that has a different graphic for HSM’s shader) The night mode template will also be in my HSM source repo.
The original overlays with the dark bezels have been replaced by the color ones, the source files contain both bezels in case anyone wants to change back. (I won’t be including both… I am worried about redundancy down the road causing the repo to grow too large.) Not all bezels were changed. If I liked the black I kept it. (As you can tell by the screenshots)
Now… on to some new art!
Hello @Duimon. Thanks for this, really digging the night versions here. Can you please advise how are you setting this up? I set bezel and frame to 0 and then applied this as an overlay, but unfortunately that also hides bezel reflections.
First you need load one of HSM’s shaders and create either a game or core preset. Then use the night version graphics as the background in the shader. (By manually editing the background image path in the preset *.slangp.)
I have all my graphics in an “images” folder in the root of my Retroarch folder to make it easier to get to them.
Then using the shader parameters.
Set the bezel and frame to 0% opacity.
Tweak the 2D curvature (I haven’t tried the 3D) and Non-Integer scale. (It should be really easy to do)
Finally you need to fine tune the bezel height and width to tweak where the reflection falls. (This is easiest to do by playing a game until there is a good amount of reflection going on) (I also have the retroarch UI background opacity turned down by default so I can see the game better during parameter adjustments)
Ideally you also need to set the bezel color value to match as well as you can but the default dark color should work if you are not fussy)
HSM an I have been talking some more and this may get far easier to do in the near future.
When the shader eventually hits the repo I will be releasing presets for all my HSM graphics. (For just the HSM Dr. Venom shader. 
I may do a poll to decide which shader to use.)
I have just now included these instructions in the night repo README.
Aaaaaaand, I have new default presets! Thank you for the detailed explanation, this looks gorgeous now 
How would I get two separate cores (Genesis Plus GX for Genesis, and bsnes-mercury-accuracy for SNES) that I use the same shader (crt-guest-sm) on , have their respective graphics? I did what was mentioned above about saving a core/game preset, but the preset only says this in the file for both presets:
#reference “…\shaders\shaders_slang\crt\hsm-mega-bezel-reflection-crt-guest-sm.slangp”
Genesis works fine, as that is the background image I have in the crt-guest-sm.slangp file. But if i go to load an SNES game in bsnes-mercury and apply the shader, it will show the Genesis overlay graphics.
Did I miss a step? TIA
