Please show off what crt shaders can do!

[Syh]

I thought of an interesting idea, imo.

Instead of applying the bloom halation after the scanlines I’m going to try and apply it before the scanlines. And then do the diffusion after the scanlines.

So it’ll look like this.

Sample blur passes like normal, apply blur passes and halation adjust (setting) to the image, then apply the scanlines on top of that, then finish off the bloom by applying the diffusion after the scanlines to blur.

Edit: So that was fun, it’s not worth taking a screenshot of right now as it needs tweaked but you kinda end up with a result like crtglow.

[Syh]

Some more experimenting. I think these are the happiest I’ve been with, wish I could do a little more with the scanlines but I have to sacrifice the curvature for it.

[hunterk]

With the heavy deconvergence, it looks like a projection screen TV

[Syh]

Are you talking about those giant monster TV’s, the rear-projection ones?

[Nesguy]

Yep, rear projection CRT. They were known for having pretty bad picture quality Their big selling point was screen size.

[Syh]

Hopefully these look less like a rear-projection tv. Changed the curvature some, and lowered the deconvergence some. Is the paleness part of the issue? (If so my next shots I’ll fix that some.)

[hunterk]

heh, yeah, that was part of it. I didn’t mean it as a dig, though.

[Syh]

Fiddled with the settings some more, reduced the paleness some. Reduced the deconvergence some, did some new stuff with color. (Removed some green from white, and added some yellow to red, on top of the rest that I normally do.) And lowered the vignette strength slightly.

@hunterk you’re fine man, I didn’t take it that way. As soon as you said it I was like “oh, yeah, I see that.”. That’s just not what I was going for currently.

[Nesguy]

The images are a bit washed out and lacking in dynamic range, which is also reminiscent of RPTVs. The color tinting stuff just washes the image out more; not good unless you’re going for a particular vintage.

It’s just really difficult to have good dynamic range while having a decent scanline ratio and using a mask effect.

[Syh]

Hmmm, I’ll try something tomorrow. There’s a few things I’m doing that may be able to be adjusted so this looks better. For starters I won’t mess with the black level. But there’s some other things I’m doing that’s washing out the image some as well.

[Syh]

Here’s a combination screenshot set. I attempted to fix the washout. And at the same time I took two screenshots of every scene The first shot I’m leaving the color alone and the second shot has color adjustments. (I’ll have to play around with the color adjustments more, as I’m messing with the blue too much it seems.)

[Squalo]

@Syh - a bit too blurry I think. Everything else looking great!

[Syh]

I’ll try and sharpen it up a little, though I’m not sure if I want it much sharper then this.

I’m going to try and take some shots of the bloom setup I’ve been messing with.

I’m also wanting to fiddle with some other settings.

There’s some things going on in this setup that need motion to show off, so I may look into recording some gameplay. (Just depends on if I can figure it out and how bad the video quality ends up.)

[Nesguy]

Here’s a handy test screen from Fudoh’s 240p Test Suite for adjusting sharpness. The black circle should appear solid black at normal distance.

Horizontal sharpness 6.00, substractive sharpness 0.50. IMO this is about as sharp as a consumer grade Trinitron that’s calibrated.

Horizontal sharpness 3.00, substractive sharpness 0.00. Too blurry. The sides of the circle don’t look solid anymore.

[Syh]

I’m not trying to simulate a Trinitron really, I’m just doing whatever looks good to me honestly. (I’m trying to not get crazy with things though. Hence the adjustment of settings from feedback.)

[Nesguy]

No worries, I wasn’t suggesting that’s what you should be going for. It’s just a handy tool. You want black outlines to be black though, right?

[Syh]

I want to preface this with this isn’t meant to come off as defensive, I’m just try to share my personal knowledge and opinion, on the matter.

From my understanding from when I used to do pixel art, most of the time were not really using black outlines to have “black outlines”, we’re using them to create contrast in the image and make the thing with an outline stand out more against the background. (That’s why in a lot of higher end “bit?” pixel art, they use the “darkest” shades of the other colors as outlines, because they had the color count to do this. This usually creates a smoother transition into the background while still standing out enough to not affect readability.)

This may also vary artist to artist so grain of salt, lol.

[Nesguy]

Yeah, I don’t think there’s one right answer to this as different artists employed different techniques. Probably something that should be adjusted per-game. I know I like a heavier blur when playing PSX stuff because those low res textures are rough. I actually usually prefer sharper settings for older content since too much blur causes some small details to be lost.

[Syh]

It’s basically just guest-dr-venom with deconvergence and color adjustments, soo… 🤷.

Maybe your talking about the settings, lol.

[Nesguy]

I also had a crappy TV with just composite inputs growing up, 20” screen, and it was a lot sharper than these examples. By the 1980s most TVs had good analogue comb filters, afaik.

But he already said he’s not going for accuracy per se, just what looks good to him…