BTS - Beautifully Textured Skyrim ReShade Preset

Introduction:

As a long term enb user, but on a heavily modded setup, at one point I had to accept that my hardware struggled to keep performance at a minimum for gameplay with just about any enb preset (to give an idea, that was on my ageing GTX 980, i7 6700K with 32Gb of RAM at 1063MHz and SSE running on a 960 EVO m. 2). Enbs with all the juice, including SSAO and DoF, water, complex particle lights, etc... would usually bring me down to the low 30's, and too often dip even lower. So I took to finding alternatives that allowed me to enhance my visuals with minimal performance cost.

Now I can play on better hardware, and I'll often use enb, but I often still miss the look and feel of the original game or weather mod, so I come back to this ReShade for that particular reason - it was built to enhance the game's visuals, not change them, after much experimentation and testing of various other presets in actual gameplay, when I felt that I needed to create something specific to my very simple goals:

i. to sharpen the image and bring out as much texture detail as possible;

ii. to preserve colours and other game visuals;

iii. to have the lowest impact on performance possible, while doing the above;

There really isn't much to add at this point. If you like how your game looks, be it vanilla or after adding the lighting, weather, models and texture mods of your choice, either of these presets may well give you a noticeable enhancement, with next to zero performance cost. It will sharpen the image and bring out all the fine details in every texture - especially if your're mainly using 2k or higher resolution textures. Be it your silverware, furniture, dwemer metal, stone walls and floors, wooden beams, character skin, ground, ice, snow, tree bark or foliage - everything will be full of rich detail.

Thanks for downloading, endorse if you like, cheers and criticism are both welcome.

Classic version:

Sharpening was not exaggerated so as to not create "artificial noise", but simply allow the original detail of your textures to shine through Skyrim's somewhat blurry rendering. This is the main purpose of this preset and is achieved with the Lumasharpen and Finesharp shaders.

Then I wanted to try a very subtle enhancement of colour and contrast that highlighted the original look and feel, instead of replacing it with something completely new. It's neither fantasy nor realism - it's what your mods (or vanilla game) make of your game. Vibrance will very slightly enhance colours, Levels only so slightly enhance shadows - for I found that any type of AO through Reshade would inevitably create weird artifacts in certain scenes.

(late) 2021 version:[/c