Gothic Natural Lighting (Reshade Preset)

Description

The colony is a dangerous place. Bloodflies, scavengers, minecrawlers... and apparently the sun itself lol

If you've ever felt that Gothic Remake's sunlight can be a bit too intense, with some areas becoming overwhelmingly bright while shadows occasionally hide environmental detail, this preset aims to dial things back a notch. The goal isn't to transform the game's visuals or push a cinematic look, but simply to make the lighting feel a little more natural, balanced, and comfortable to look at during long play sessions.

Gothic Natural Lighting is a lightweight ReShade preset focused primarily on reducing aggressive highlights and softening the contrast between brightly lit and shadowed areas. The game's full release already features a significantly improved color palette compared to the Nyras Demo, so this preset uses only subtle color adjustments and avoids heavy-handed grading. Sunlit surfaces retain more detail, shadows become easier to read, and the overall image feels slightly more balanced while remaining faithful to the original art direction.

The changes are subtle. You might not notice them at first glance on the screenshots, but in game they make a noticeable difference. If you like the game's vanilla graphics, but feel that contrast and highlight/shadow balance in this game is not to your liking, I highly recommend trying this preset for yourself. Since it's ReShade, you can always tweak it further on your own.

If you want to achieve the exact same look as in my screenshots, I have Saturation set to +10 in the in-game settings.

Features

• []Reduces overly bright highlights and harsh sunlight: The strongest adjustment in the preset is aimed at bright areas of the image. The colony no longer feels like it's constantly in blazing sun, 30 degrees Celsius, but a more temperate weather. [/]

  []Softens the contrast between light and shadow: Shadows remain atmospheric, but are less crushing and easier to read. They're also slightly more blue (very slightly) to make them feel cooler, further emphasizing that it's not a super hot summer outside.[/]

  []Subtle color balancing: Unlike other Nyras demo-focused presets, this preset uses very restrained color correction. It avoids fighting the full game's updated visuals and instead complements them. Subtle adjustments to greens and yellows help vegetation and terrain appear more natural without dramatically changing the game's appearance. Red has also a bit more exposure, mainly to make Old Camp armors pop a bit more visually.[/]

  []Maintains the original art direction: No sharpening, bloom, HDR, LUTs, film grain, cinematic filters, depth of field, or other heavy visual effects. The preset focuses entirely on lighting and color balance.[/]

Installation instructions

[]Open the game's .exe directory (X:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Gothic 1 Remake\G1R\Binaries\Win64)[/]

[]Place my file ("GothicCleanedUp.ini") in that folder.[/]

[]Download ReShade[/]

[]Open Reshade_Setup.exe[/]

[]Find Gothic 1 Remake on the list of games (there will be two .exes available, pick the second one)[/]

[]On the "Select effects to install" screen, find at the bottom "Choose a preset file (.ini) to install only the effects it uses", click "Browse" and direct it to the "GothicCleanedUp.ini" that we placed earlier. This way, only the two effects I use in my preset will be downloaded. If you want the full library of effects to play around with on your own, use the "Check all" button at the top instead.[/]

[]After installation, start the game, click "Home" on your keyboard as told by the prompt at the top of the screen (if it's not doing anything then you must have installed ReShade incorrectly) and click "Skip Tutorial"[/]

[]At the top, next to two arrows "< >" it should say "ReShadePreset": click that and from the drop-down list pick "GothicCleanedUp.ini".[/]

[]Voila, it should be working out of the box.[/]

[*](OPTIONAL) If you want to be able to quickly toggle the effect on and off to compare the difference, go into the "