If you like both, keep both. If one of them is too dark, you might notice it more on bright games.
The next thing is that it can make a difference if playing in a dark environment where your pupils might be dilated vs playing in a bright one when making your adjustments.
I can tell that you’ve been working on improving the brightness of your presets. Looking good so far!
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Magic Glow is creating a large vertical spike, which might be hard to notice unless one is scrutinizing screenshots. @Hari-82 did mention it though.
I also notice nothing but Black beyond the spike and I also notice that you no longer tweak the Mask Gamma to show the Mask slightly on your dark areas.
Not saying you should do this but you could if you wanted to improve your realism I suppose:
Instead of using Magic Glow to transition and taper the phosphor/beam edges, you can lower the Magic Glow so that it’s barely visible at the top of the top and bottom edges of the beam, then increase the level of the unlit phosphors/mask using the Base (Black) Mask Strength parameter so that it’s probably one or two steps before they disappear. In other words it shouldn’t negatively affect your black levels in any noticeable way while under scrutiny the image might look a little closer to a real CRT photo.
Don’t raise it to the point where you can easily see it though. That’s not how it works. This is something that we don’t even normally see in CRT TVs unless it’s a picture or something with a particular ISO setting. So less is more.
Yes, I mean exactly like that! Feel free to tweak the Magic Glow to your liking though but the unlit phosphors are hardly visible so it’s good that you’ve resisted the temptation to crank it all the way so everyone can see the effect. Not everything has to be easily seen or noticed to make a difference.
I might still tone down the Magic Glow a bit so that the transition is more subtle but that’s just me. If that’s how you want it that’s fine as well.
I found in my experience that when it was set too high, it affected things like the white outline of the power bars in Street Fighter II in a slightly unrealistic manner.
Again, it sometimes isn’t about being able to see the effect, but the effect of the effect when combined with other things to encompass a whole.
Thank you , I realized the importance of using green deconvergence, I never touched it before too much, and I was messing a lot until I found the good combination of all X & Y Mask deconvergence, so the brightness pops out with lower mask gamma. Now looks more like a real CRT. Can you check the images above again? I just update it them, because I had slightly missalignment before. Now it’s fixed and looks better.