New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

Rincewind · 1 May 2022 10:59

Excellent, I gave it a good workout in the last two hours and all the features work flawlessly on my NVidia RTX 3060, zero issues. I don’t care about curvature stuff personally, but some people might find it handy. I really like the new halation and separate dark and light pixel controls for the slot mask. I tried all mask variations and I’m still finding the simple magenta/green mask (type 0) combined with the separate slot mask to work best for my purposes (C=1084 monitor emulation at 3x-3.5x on 1080p). With the aid of the new brightness and colour controls in the colour shader, I was able to make some subtle but important improvements to my previous preset, namely better control of bright highlights without strange artifacts and zero luminance loss compared to the raw image. So great additions, thanks for updating these!

Attached an example for you to see where my preset stands now. I’ll wait a bit with updating the article as I have a feeling you’ll eventually port the deconvergence too, and that will bump the realism up a notch again… so I’ll wait for that (hint, hint… )

guest.r · 2 May 2022 06:12

Really nice screenies. I would like to add that a nice shadowmask setup could work with mask 10.0 and mask shift of 2.0. Mask 10.0 is a bit coarse for 1080p, but looks really nice with mask shift.

As promised, i added deconvergence to the WinUaeMaskGlowAdvanced.fx shader. Works really nice and does not interfere with masks, on-pair with the current guest-advanced shaders. It’s quite simple to setup, a good start for example is horizontal red to 1.0 and horizontal blue to -1.0. Ofc. many combinations are possible.

The shaders for WinUAE and ReShade can be found here:

Rincewind · 2 May 2022 11:19

Great! You’re doing God’s work! It makes a nice difference in homeopathic amounts like you suggested. The penny dropped just after about 30 mins of tweaking that in fact I also need to increase the sharpness in the shader to compensate, otherwise there will be too much blur going on…

Indeed, I tried it and I think I prefer it to my previous method now. The only problem is that it’s more prone to moire in the lightest shades when anything is added to it (extra brightness with colour shader, or even just bloom or halation). Somehow it’s much more sensitive than my previous mask 0 + slotmask method.

For the record, this is my shader chain:

CRT-A2080 -> WinUaeMaskGlowAdvanced -> WinUaeColor

I think the problem is, at least with brightness and colour adjustments in the colour shader, that it disturbs the masks & scanlines too much. I’m quite sure this would be the ideal chain:

Brightness/Contrast/Saturation (on the raw image) -> CRT-A02080 -> WinUaeMaskGlowAdvanced -> WinUaeColor (profile only)

And indeed, if I raise the brightness using the “Brightness” control in WinUAE’s Display panel, then there’s zero extra artifacts, which makes perfect sense. It’s a shame because I really like this new Brightness control… But like you said, we’d need a better multipass shader architecture in WinUAE to be able to move the ReShade stuff into WinUAE with total control over the order of stages.

Anyway, not complaining, I can still obtain good results with this workaround

BT-Kimosabe · 3 May 2022 01:21

i really wish that guest.r could take a look at Tyrell’s CRT Shaders for dosbox, i would love to see some presets for ECE and X, mainly for old windows games and dos games that uses SVGA

TheNamec · 3 May 2022 15:57

Taking notes! Thanks as always master @guest.r

Rincewind · 5 May 2022 01:45

Adding some very subtle deconvergence and halation was definitely an improvement, I like the quite “organic” look I’m getting. I had to dial back the halation though, around 0.7 red horizontal shift and -0.7 horizontal blue, plus reduced the strength to about 0.7 as well. That’s probably because I’m using 3x to 3.5x scaling.

Some screenies:

Syh · 5 May 2022 06:46

Adding just the smallest tiniest amount of noise/film-grain will go a long way towards that “organic” look imho.

RealNC · 5 May 2022 06:52

Noise ruins the black level. The image gets that “washed out” look.

Syh · 5 May 2022 07:07

Ruins is a tad dramatic, and it seriously depends on how much noise we’re adding to the image, I’m literally suggesting just one or two notches of it. (Barely going to affect the black levels, it definitely will but w/e).

I understand what you’re complaining about as I’ve personally dealt with it myself, I just don’t care

Rincewind · 5 May 2022 07:06

Depends on how you do it, it doesn’t have to be.

Just tried it quickly in Photoshop with some gaussian BW noise on a mid-gray layer added with Overlay mode at 50% opacity. That leaves the blacks and the overall luminance 100% intact, it only disturbs the luminance of a few pixels a little. It’s quite nice, indeed @Syh, thanks for the tip! It breaks up the synthetic look even more, which makes sense, nothing is 100% perfect in manufacturing in real life. Now I’ll only need to find a way how replicate this with some ReShade filter as the last layer Any tips? I guess some simple shader will do that can overlay any texture with pixel-perfect mapping with some PS overlay-like blending.

RealNC · 5 May 2022 07:44

I believe they meant the shader option for noise. If it’s available in the winuae version, of course.

0 noise. The black around the shader output is the same as the black inside the shader output:

Noise set to 0.3. The black inside the shader output is not really black:

Some people like this effect though. It makes the image look similar to what a CRT looks when you view it in a lit room. (The light reflects off the CRT screen and it’s not black anymore.)

Rincewind · 5 May 2022 07:52

Cheers, it’s not bad, but I find the noise a bit too much personally. What I’ve done in literally 2 minutes is:

create new layer in PS, fill with 128 gray
Filter -> Add Noise -> Gaussian / 4% / Monochromatic
Blend 40%, Overlay blend mode

That’s it, I find the effect quite nice. Should be dead easy to do in a ReShade shader (no, the WinUAE shaders don’t have built-in noise functionality). The PS blend modes are documented here, it doesn’t seem too heavy calculation wise, it just screws around with the sRGB pixels like half of the PS blend modes… I might even implement myself if I don’t find something that does it already.

(Target > 0.5) * (1 - (1-2*(Target-0.5)) * (1-Blend)) + (Target <= 0.5) * ((2*Target) * Blend)

https://www.deepskycolors.com/archivo/2010/04/21/formulas-for-Photoshop-blending-modes.html

Rincewind · 5 May 2022 08:03

Lo and behold, good things come to those who can use Google

Overlay formula

github.com

prod80/prod80-ReShade-Repository/blob/master/Shaders/PD80_00_Blend_Modes.fxh#L75=


}

float3 darken(float3 c, float3 b)       { return min(c,b);}
float3 multiply(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return c*b;}
float3 linearburn(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return max(c+b-1.0f,0.0f);}
float3 colorburn(float3 c, float3 b)    { return b<=0.0f ? b:saturate(1.0f-((1.0f-c)/b)); }
float3 lighten(float3 c, float3 b) 		{ return max(b,c);}
float3 screen(float3 c, float3 b) 		{ return 1.0f-(1.0f-c)*(1.0f-b);}
float3 colordodge(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return b>=1.0f ? b:saturate(c/(1.0f-b));}
float3 lineardodge(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return min(c+b,1.0f);}
float3 overlay(float3 c, float3 b) 		{ return c<0.5f ? 2.0f*c*b:(1.0f-2.0f*(1.0f-c)*(1.0f-b));}
float3 softlight(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return b<0.5f ? (2.0f*c*b+c*c*(1.0f-2.0f*b)):(sqrt(c)*(2.0f*b-1.0f)+2.0f*c*(1.0f-b));}
float3 vividlight(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return b<0.5f ? colorburn(c,(2.0f*b)):colordodge(c,(2.0f*(b-0.5f)));}
float3 linearlight(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return b<0.5f ? linearburn(c,(2.0f*b)):lineardodge(c,(2.0f*(b-0.5f)));}
float3 pinlight(float3 c, float3 b) 	{ return b<0.5f ? darken(c,(2.0f*b)):lighten(c, (2.0f*(b-0.5f)));}
float3 hardmix(float3 c, float3 b)      { return vividlight(c,b)<0.5f ? float3(0.0,0.0,0.0):float3(1.0,1.0,1.0);}
float3 reflect(float3 c, float3 b)      { return b>=1.0f ? b:saturate(c*c/(1.0f-b));}
float3 glow(float3 c, float3 b)         { return reflect(b,c);}
float3 blendhue(float3 c, float3 b)         { return blendColor(b,c,c);}
float3 blendsaturation(float3 c, float3 b)  { return blendColor(c,b,c);}
float3 blendcolor(float3 c, float3 b)       { return blendLuma(b,c);}

A texture based Gaussian noise sampler

github.com

prod80/prod80-ReShade-Repository/blob/master/Shaders/PD80_00_Noise_Samplers.fxh

/*
 *  Shared textures across shaders by prod80
 *  Required for proper effect execution
 */

// Textures
texture texNoise        < source = "pd80_bluenoise.png"; >       { Width = 512; Height = 512; Format = RGBA8; };
texture texNoiseRGB     < source = "pd80_bluenoise_rgba.png"; >  { Width = 512; Height = 512; Format = RGBA8; };
texture texGaussNoise   < source = "pd80_gaussnoise.png"; >      { Width = 512; Height = 512; Format = RGBA8; };

// Samplers
sampler samplerNoise
{ 
    Texture = texNoise;
    MipFilter = POINT;
    MinFilter = POINT;
    MagFilter = POINT;
    AddressU = WRAP;
    AddressV = WRAP;
    AddressW = WRAP;

This file has been truncated. show original

Now it only takes some hackery

I’m pretty sure Guest’s version simply just adds the noise, hence the raised black floor. So maybe overlay blend mode could be made an option (I used overlay blend mode a lot when dodging/burning photos… if the overlay layer is “centered” around a 128 grey then it maintains the luminance in plain old RGB mode even).

Duimon · 5 May 2022 10:24

I asked @HyperspaceMadness for an Overlay blend mode in the Mega Bezel way back when and he ran into a roadblock. (I’m not sure where.)

If you could make it work maybe it would solve some masking issues I’m having with the HDR shaders.

Cyber · 5 May 2022 13:32

I’ve mentioned this several times before, and this is from experience and testing.

You can’t illustrate GDV noise using screenshots or any freeze frame, including pausing the emulator due to its temporal nature. The image wouldn’t look anything like it does when the game/emulation is running.

You might instead have to use video clips with the proper encoding settings so as to be able to preserve the fine details of the noise or maybe a photograph of the screen that has the appropriate shutter settings in order to capture all phases of the noise.

Any other way will be presenting an image that is most likely missing data that will be displayed in subsequent frames or were displayed in previous frames.

For some strange reason I’m not noticing this raised black floor at all in any of my presets, of which the majority use a tiny amount of GDV Noise.

Perhaps I’m doing something “wrong” ?

RealNC · 5 May 2022 14:08

I was just showing the black level issue. Not the noise itself.

hunterk · 5 May 2022 14:23

the black level (and/or general color quality) is why I prefer the noise to happen in the texture coordinate instead of just adding/multiplying/whatever random values per pixel. This kind of noise more closely mimics the movement/“sparkle” I see in the scanlines of my own CRTs. I think doing luma-only noise (simulated film grain) usually looks better than RGB noise, too, unless you’re trying to imitate actual static/interference.

See the noise I added to crtglow to help with the moire as an example of the texcoord-type noise (enable curvature and then set both x/y values to 0.0 and the noise to 0.5-0.75; the default 1.0 is too heavy for a flat image IMO)

HyperspaceMadness · 5 May 2022 14:25

Yeah I think it would be relatively straightforward to apply the noise like that with a middle gray, and have everything under middle applied as darkening and everything above adding white

Cyber · 5 May 2022 15:14

I really meant illustrating anything involving GDV Noise. The image in the screenshot or paused emulator wouldn’t really be representative of what the user would see, including black levels.

bradley1492 · 6 May 2022 13:14

Hello, a few days ago I switched to glsl from slang. Now I stumbled upon the gdv-mini shader. Is the concept behind that shader to be even faster than the gdv-fast preset?