Half Pixel, Half Smooth. Best of Both Worlds

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

First thing first, I’m new here. I’m happy to have found people discussing shaders because I was feeling like the only one who bothers to experiment with uncommon shaders. I’ve had libretro shader pack for a long time and I never realized there was a forum here.

My go to shader/filter combination is something that I’ve been only able to achieve in Snes9x. I spent a couple hours trying to duplicate the results in RetroArch yesterday but couldn’t do so.

Basically I load \xbr\shaders\legacy\ 2xbr-v3.7c-dark or 2xbr-v3.7c-light in Direct3D or OpenGL and then select Simple 2X in the Output Image Processing drop down menu.

output_XKNaKB
output_XKNaKB.gif1024×896 388 KB

This gif alternates from nothing added to dark or light shader.

You might need to right click ‘view image’ to zoom in. Optional: link, link2

Are there any other ways to have some colors left pixelated and others smoothed? My method isn’t the best - although it is easy to accomplish in Snes9x. I think that this is great direction for developers to undertake. My combo would be improved if the the shaded colors were smoothed out more like the awesome ScaleFx. Diagonals are still quite bumpy as you can see on megaman’s boots.

I am curious if anyone else likes the idea of having both pixels and smoothing at the same time. Feel free to chime in. :sparkles:

#2

1zomb
1zomb.gif1024×896 351 KB

link

I like the idea of preserving original pixel artwork but smoothing some color bands.

#3

I think you should be able to get that same effect by making an initial pass with the stock shader at 2.0x scale and then follow it with a normal single-pass xBR shader.

If you’re just wanting to smooth out gradients and not smooth out pixel edges, you might check out the denoiser/bilateral shaders.

#4

Thank you. Your first suggestion helped me getting my combos working in Retroarch.

Your second suggestion doesn’t accomplish the effect I’m looking for: which is like applying high level xbr or scalefx to only dark shades of colors leaving the light shades untouched (or vice versa).