Shamal Gold

Description

Mirage already looks good. The problem is the display. An SDR screen has a fixed amount of room, so fitting a Baghdad afternoon into it means some of that separation gets lost. Shadows lose a little of their detail and the brightest stonework flattens toward white.

Shamal Gold brings a lot of that detail back. It uses a shader I wrote called PHDRPlus. It combines several virtual exposures of the same frame and adjusts the tonal curve across different parts of the image. In practice, brick and plaster keep more of their texture in full sun, shaded alleys and courtyards hold onto more of their detail, and at night a lamp stays separate from the wall behind it.

I didn't want it to turn into one of those overprocessed ReShade presets. No heavy colour grading, crushed blacks, bloom, or vignette. The dusty haze that gives the city its distance is mostly left alone, since flattening it makes the desert look like a diorama. There are two colour changes and both are small. Highlights get a slight golden tint and shadows go slightly blue, which is roughly what daylight does anyway. In very dark scenes the image shifts a bit further toward blue, similar to how our vision shifts at night.

You do not need an HDR monitor. This runs on an ordinary SDR display, and Windows HDR should stay off. Despite the name, this doesn't require an HDR display. HDR here refers to the processing rather than the display.

Installation instructions

If ReShade is already installed in your game folder, skip to step 4.

• []Download the latest ReShade 6.x from reshade.me and select ACMirage.exe from your game folder. [/]

  []Choose DirectX 10/11/12 as the rendering API.[/]

  []When it offers you the shader packages, tick nothing and continue. You don't need any shader packages, everything is included in the archive.[/]

  []Copy Shamal Gold.ini and the reshade-shaders folder into the game folder. If a reshade-shaders folder is already there, let Windows merge the files.[/]

  []Start the game, press HOME, and pick Shamal Gold from the preset dropdown.[/]

  Main features

  • []Multi exposure tone fusion, which does most of the work when it comes to recovering the lost range.[/]

    []Per zone tonal control, so I can open up the shadows without washing out the sky.[/]

    []Eye adaptation as you move between sunlit rooftops and dark interiors.[/]

    []Purkinje shift, which moves the image slightly toward blue in very dark scenes.[/]

    []Debanding on both the input and output, with blue noise dithering to help keep the gradients clean after stretching the contrast.[/]

    []A dark scene fade that gradually backs off the effect when there isn't much range left to recover.[/]

    Requirements

    ReShade 6.x with the DirectX 10/11/12 renderer, from reshade.me

    That's it. The shader is already bundled, so you don't need to install any shader packs or select anything during setup.

    Shout outs

    PHDRPlus is my extension of PHDR by BarbatosBachiko, which is based on singleLDR2HDR by ray075hl.

    • []PHDRPlus: github.com/danyalziakhan/dz-shaders/blob/main/Shaders/PHDRPlus.fx[/]

      []PHDR: github.com/BarbatosBachiko/Reshade-Shaders[/]

      []singleLDR2HDR: github.com/ray075hl/singleLDR2HDR[/]