Down zoomed mask 12 (7->4) is a bit less brighter and somewhat ‘rounded’. It looks subjectively better to me in many cases.
But are you talking about guest NTSC or guest standard?
What I mean is that Mask 12 and 13 in guest NTSC and Mask 12 and 13 in guest standard are different, as they have different color subpixels. This, even before zooming out.
Or maybe I’ve touched something I shouldn’t have.
Dunno, the mask code is identical. I checked it a minute ago. You can check if you don’t use a different mask layout between these two.
I can’t zoom your screenshot. Looks like you posted some thumbnail only.
It’s quite interesting to see you playing around with CRT-Guest-Advanced after I starting playing around with CRT-Royale after our recent postings and conversations in the Please show off what CRT Shaders can do thread.
What do we call this “cultural exchange” ? Lol
As for your question I got my feet wet using Mega Bezel Reflection Shader which has even more options for controlling and getting confused by these things and had only recently started dabbling in standalone CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC.
But generally I try to use things that dilute the Mask very sparingly and I sometimes tweak those things from very close to the screen. Even a little dose of Bloom, and a slight dash of Glow or Magic Glow and Halation can also contribute to overall brightness in addition to just turning the knob all the way to 11.
So it’s just up to us to know when to stop. Do we want things to have this much blurry side effects or not and stuff like that. I think tweaking close to the screen helps us to really understand what’s going on with each setting.
I use Gamma_C (Gamma Correct) a lot. I’ve tried approaches where I’ve used Post CRT Brightness more or as a starting point.
I’ve recently started using Bright Boost Light and Bright Boost Dark (which is a great contrast/dynamics fine tuner if you ask me) because it doesn’t dilute the Mask. It instead can clip though.
So each method has its pros and cons but I’ve learned a lot in a short space of time using Royale though and I can definitely see strengths and weaknesses when comparing both approaches to doing things.
Another thing to mention @Hyllian is are you using the same Luts/Colour Management between CRT-Royale and CRT-Guest-Advanced? Also do try CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC as it does certain things a little differently and you might appreciate the difference in the look of CRT-Guest-Advanced-HD.
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Well, given the amount of knobs, it’s virtually infinite the number of visual possibilities with these shaders. I’m always learning.
About the LUTs, I’ve been experimenting some and I’m reaching the conclusion that the NTSC one is what I like more.
Ah, ok. Looks like you’re using a fat mask.
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Don’t forget you can refine/resaturate your mask after dilution with the Mask Gamma setting.
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Yeah, 1440p monitor here. But my taste changes often, sometimes I even use the zoomed (value: 1) Mask 7, which is very bright as it’s (as far as I remember) a white/black mask. Give it a try!
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Seems to be broken on OpenEmu again (although not the RA metal driver, oddly?). The last working version is 2023-07-17-r1.
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Can you provide some logs? Would be very helpful. 
(if possible with the most recent version)
Nothing’s showing up in the log. The error is just “The operation couldn’t be completed. (OpenEmuShaders.SourceParserError error 6.)”, which isn’t very helpful.
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I can’t test it myself, so it’s good to stick to the last working version for now.
It’s probably not a parse/compile error but something in the frontend driver. If you could report it via github maybe it could get resolved.
That’s probably a no-go; the last release of OpenEmu was in January 2021 and I can’t build the current code myself as it requires Ventura (macOS 13) to build despite running on Mojave (10.14) or later.
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I see. But 2023-07-17-r1 is fortunatelly quite new. You could also copy/replace the ntsc and bloom slang shaders from the newest version into it. I think it should do and you’ll get most of the updates.
And if then newest ntsc or bloom shaders are causing the error then it’s a good trace of the issue.
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Hey @guest.r would it be possible to separate the “scanline saturation/ mask fall off” from each other? I would like to just use the mask falloff feature by itself, or is that a setting that only works with the two of them together by design?
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It’s basically the same thing (and same code), but you see it like scanline saturation with dissolved masks and as mask falloff with strong stripe-based masks situations.
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Ah ok. I thought they were somehow two different type of settings that you “merged” together or something. From what I noticed at least with my current preset samples and my crazy tweaking is that lowering that setting seems to make colors look a little more natural bringing it a bit closer to how things look when not using any shader at all.
Still testing things out in any case, I feel about 90 percent satisfied with how my current slot mask presets look, maybe one more tweak of something and they should be good to go.
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It seems to be the newer ntsc shaders causing the issue. The newer crt-guest-advanced-ntsc-pass2 also causes an error, but it’s “error 1” rather than “error 6.”
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