I have an idea for a shader, though the effect I’m looking for has already been partially addressed by another. Basically, I’d like a shader that applies only a veeeeeeery small amount of blur, comparable to that which the Pixellate shader applies to certain pixel edges when using non-integer scaling, only on the whole image. The idea is to soften out the edges of all the pixels in the image, just enough to make it look not so damn, well, pixellated, but not as blurry as bilinear. Lanczos IMO doesn’t satisfy me in this respect due to the ringing.
That said, there is one shader, or should I say shader variant that more or less does what I want already, namely this variant for CRT-Geom I cooked up to make thin, 480p-esque scanlines:
I made some additional modifications, namely disabling the interlacing, gamma correction, and phosphor emulation, and increasing the scanline weight so as to make the scanlines lighter. The end result is scanlines that are barely visible, with the added effect of just a pixel or two of blur, enough to give the image a slightly soft look without going overboard. Here’s an example:
There is a downside to this shader, however. For one, not everyone might appreciate the scanlines, though I personally do not mind them since they’re so light. Second, this doesn’t play nice with any scale other than 2x and 4x due to the scanlines, though simple aspect ratio correction works well.
So my proposition is a shader that applies the slight softening seen in the screenshot, but without the scanlines. Pixellate does something similar, but the problem with it is that it is basically just nearest neighbor with slight blurring on only certain edges to hide rounding errors. I want that slight blur, but on the whole image. But of course, I have very little know-how on the matter, else I wouldn’t be here requesting help.