Sharpening and Film Grain Begone

1. DESCRIPTION

By default, NFS: Heat uses a very agressive sharpening filter (unsharp mask, to be specific) that can't be disabled. A film grain filter is also used and can't be disabled either.

The sharpening pass impacts image quality negatively, by introducing over-sharpening artifacts (ghosting, ringing, haloing, shimmering - the works). It crushes black levels, and also introduces its very own brand of aliasing. As for the film grain filter - it's way too pronounced.

This mod disables both sharpening and film grain filter, whenever they are used (including cutscenes, garage/menus, etc) without disabling other effects to preserve the original art direction. The film grain filter can still be used in Photo Mode.

The result is a much cleaner and smoother image - no more sharpening artifacts, aliasing and ghosting are minimized, to name a few benefits.

There's a bunch of similar mods out there already, but none fit my tastes exactly. They either remove all post-processing effects, or don't work in some scenes (eg Garage/Menus).

It's quite hard to showcase the issues I mentioned with screenshots only, especially with Nexusmods's compression. Here are side-by-side comparisons with a slider, uncompressed and in full size. All screenshots were taken at 2560x1440, Ultra settings, 200% Resolution Scale.

Don't hesitate to zoom-in!

Slider Comparison 1

Slider Comparison 2

Slider Comparison 3

Slider Comparison 4

2. INSTALLATION

Use Frosty Mod Manager. Clicking on this link will take you to the official website, where you can also find instructions on how to set it up, and install mods with it. Worry not - it's very straight forward, but you will be prompted to enter a a decryption key.

When prompted, paste: 0B0E04030409080C010708010E0B0B0 (Thanks to AntiLoser and Frosty Devs)

3. CREDITS & SPECIAL THANKS

- CadeEvs for FrostyEditor & Mod Manager

If you like this mod, please consider endorsing it!