Objective image quality when using shaders

When you see in live a screen CRT, you see the tree colors RGB in the pixel, and the space too. You and hunterk dominate this good, are boss, i am sure you can do it, maybe @hunterk told to you some things because he known HLSL shader. The screen of abobe is veery close to a real CRT arcade, i add best colors etc, but the mask is the good.

Yes, I understand all of that, but you’re failing to account for how the LCD subpixel structure interacts with the mask pattern. You should check out this post at @hunterk’s blog for more information on how the shader pattern interacts with an LCD’s subpixel structure.

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Yes i know how to some types of CRT look, about colors etc some things, but you are the expert how LCD screens interact with mask etc like hunterk member.

A simple RGB pattern doesn’t interact well with typical LCD subpixels, that’s what the magenta/green aperture grille pattern (as one example among many) is meant to address. You should check out the link above if you haven’t yet; it explains all of this in great detail and has a lot of good photos illustrating these concepts.

Here are a couple shots using my new “xVM” preset. This might be even more dynamic than my current shadow mask preset. I’m pretty pleased with these results; this is the first time I’ve been able to achieve this kind of dynamic range while having BVM-like scanlines.

Increase backlight to 100% and view at full size:

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Looking good. Secret of Mana really pops.

Thanks! Forgot to raise Gamma for the Alien Trilogy shot, 2.8 is probably more appropriate.

@Nesguy I was reading some of your comments on Gamma, how scanlines and other settings may impact the gamma curve outside of the Gamma settings itself.

I’m experimenting a bit with raising scanline settings to extreme values, based on your idea posted somewhere else, and also using some other settings outside of the normal boundaries and I’m getting good results for the Gamma curve by experimenting with following extreme settings (yes some outside of what the guest-venom shader would normally allow, so change your shader min/max values for these parameters where necessary):

Set mask to “-1” and slotmask strenght to 0.00 (not using masks here…)

Grade Whitepoint 7300K

  • Dogway grade gamma to: 2.40
  • Gamma Input to: 2.20
  • Gamma Out to: 2.40

Btw I found that Gamma Input works inversely to the two others (i.e. for gamma input when raising the value it darkens the image and vice versa, just as I understand happens with gamma on real CRTs)

Scanline type 2 (with scanline saturation at default 0.50)

  • Bright Boost Pixels Dark / Bright: 0.45 / 1.00
  • Scanline beam shape low / high: 105.00 / 100.00
  • Scanline dark / bright: 0.23 / 0.32
  • Overgrown bright beam: 0.30
  • Bloom strength: 0.05
  • Substractive sharpness: 0.05

Note this uses substractive sharpness at 0.05 (i.e. very low / default setting), don’t forget as it seems to affect scanline shape!

So these are pretty out of the ordinary settings, but I noticed it gives a very well balanced gamma curve and pretty good objective image quality. The image also remains quite bright even though scanlines are defined enough, but not too strong. I don’t even have to max out the backlight for this, which is a plus in my mind.

As always purely for tinkering purpose! :smiley:

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