It’s very easy to get even 100% mask strength to look fantastic with the latest guest-dr-venom, using mask 0. Just a few small tweaks. Cranked up scanline saturation, some post crt brightness, adjusted the glow, crank up the scanlines a bit, and some color stuff.
(the usual disclaimer about viewing things at original size definitely applies)
Not going to lie, I always just max out scanline saturation (I actually can’t even with the low settings for it anymore).
yeah the expanded range really helps when you’re using obscene post crt brightness levels.
I checked on my screen and indeed looks pretty impressive, with mask at full strength. Awesome job again @guest.r
I actually think the best is to have your big eye capturing screenshot and then to have a very detailed close up shot so you can actually see what’s going on and what you might actually see with the naked eye when using the preset. Also to use standard camera settings (ISO 200, 6500K, 1/60 aperture speed) as it’s difficult to know what is the camera clipping highlights and what is a preset with bloom say.
Personally I’d like to always see a comparison shot with an actual CRT but then again a lot of shaders are artistic impressions (I suppose aren’t they all to varying degrees) which a lot of people prefer so I wouldn’t go hard-line on that.
I think the photos you posted above are the closest to what I’d like to see people shift to but are still a little too far out IMO as they hide details that you see when actually viewing the shaders.
I also think we should take a leaf out of retrogamingboards 240p forum where people embrace the beauty of the phosphors (or pixels in our case):
Here’s a good example from @oscartilheiro:
I’ll try and do some eyeballing distance tests on my CRT tomorrow (aka when I wake up)
Ik when I used it the other night, I was still able to distinguish scanlines pretty easily at 4+ feet away from my CRT. (Which was kinda surprising no cap, mask went bye bye tho at that distance, which not a surprise)
I’d take pictures, but my cameras are too potatoe atm, or I would.
Although you may not directly be able to distinguish the mask I’m pretty sure you’d be able to tell the difference between a screen with no mask and one with a mask from the other side of a large room - a good few meters away. Your visual system is pretty good at seeing detail from a distance even if it’s ‘averaged’ a bit and you find you can’t quite put your finger on whats different.
Ohh for sure, you can definitely “notice” the mask, but you can’t make any details out.
Isn’t this the same or at least very similar to Lottes just rotated? If so, won’t it suffer from some of the issues that led to the use of a rotated slot mask in Lottes in the first place?
Are you talking about the horizontally stretched dotmask (not sure why it’s called “rotated” but whatever)?
If so, this is pretty different- hunterk has a good closeup of the stretched/rotated Lottes mask on his now-famous write-up. The “issues” as I see it would be a noticeable color shift (I think it’s green?) due to irregular subpixel spacing and noticeable black gaps between subpixels. The former is more of an issue IMO, I can never get the colors/brightness etc quite right. It’s much easier to get mask 0 looking good in terms of color/brightness (standard or staggered).
The magenta-green checkerboard avoids the issues with the stretched dotmask, it looks very legit. I was going to say that the dotmask is almost more convincing than the aperture grille because it plays nicer with the LCD grid.
Mask 100% strength. Bright enough?
I know this looks “dry” to some people but I’m looking for constructive, objective criticism.
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SamplerLUT4_mipmap = "false"Here’s what I do to achieve a brighter image:
You could also try using 0,8 bloom and no post brightness, it’s up to you. I don’t like using any other brightness boost option.
did you try the settings I posted?
For this reason, in lieu of a brighter display, I typically recommend Mask 11. Same TVL, looks remarkably accurate still, and it’s much brighter.
Yes, I think that you should kill post brightness first, then tweak the other settings accordingly, there’s too much contrast as it is. Try some of my pieces of advice.
I’ll give it a try but did you actually try the settings? It seems almost too bright? The scaled thumbnail is very misleading.
too much contrast? How are you determining this? If there was too much contrast there would be clipping in the whites, but it looks fine here?
lol I messed up, meant to reply to your post on the Guest shader thread.
that makes sense, then. lol
