Disabling the annoying eye effect (HDR?) : V - Skyrim

» Tue May 29, 2012 8:47 am

When I first noticed this I thought my monitor was dying, it's so bad :/

You can reduce the effects of HDR by making the following changes in your SkyrimPrefs.ini:

[BlurShaderHDR]
bDoHighDynamicRange=0
[BlurShader]
bUseBlurShader=1

This disables HDR and enables bloom instead. The effect is still there but greatly reduced.

Anyway to do this without enabling Bloom (or using the ENBSeries mentioned below)? I'm not a fan of bloom and I have everything looking / working just as I want it outside of this one single effect.

» Tue May 29, 2012 3:10 am

Some people are reporting disabling HDR in the INI resets when loading new cells. Unconfirmed.

Not sure if there's a way to do Bloom via the INI, but through the console you can change the various HDR and Bloom adaptation settings using "shp", checking their values first with "php". Example:

shp 0 1.5 7 0.85 2 0.85 1 1.5 0.12

Will disable HDR for your playsession and reduce the Bloom effect (by reducing the Bloom Scale from the default of 4 to 2).

shp 0 1.5 7 0.85 0 0.85 1 1.5 0.12

Should disable both HDR and Bloom.

Personally I use "Adaptive HDR", either from "Skyrim Enhanced Shaders" (ENB Series) or from "Realistic Colors and Real Nights" (FXAA Post-Process Injector), both on Skyrim Nexus.

» Tue May 29, 2012 11:48 am

Our eyes are ALREADY doing this while playing, without HDR... Adding HDR just amplifies the incorrect reality which our eyes are already compensating for.

Our monitors aren't transmitting light at the brightness of fire or the sun. There's very limited range looking at a monitor, so that's where HDR lighting comes into play.

Though what we see in Skyrim is HDR abuse.

» Mon May 28, 2012 10:32 pm

Still no fix to this? It's really straining my eyes. :ermm:

Will try what generalmnx suggested but would really like an option to turn it off permanently.

» Mon May 28, 2012 9:11 pm

The auto-brightening is awful - it's extremely slow, over-the-top, and as somebody above posted is unnecessary for arguments of "realism". We already have very real eyes that we look at the game with. And when we look at something bright, after something dark, our very real eyes are already doing a very real adjustment to compensate for the monitor in front of your face throwing out lots of light then suddenly very little light. Adding a very slow, blatant, and "fake" adjustment on top just stands out as silly.

Clearly there are people that like it - but there are those that don't, and those that don't tend to have an extreme objection to it (rather than it being a "It'd look a little nicer if it didn't do it but I don't mind really") - so it should definitely be an option to disable [img]http://www.gamesas.com/images/smilie/biggrin.gif[/img] (whether that be with an ini tweak or an option in the launcher settings, either way... the launcher settings are definitely quite slim pickings as they stand for the 'advanced' tab).

Our eyes adjust to real world contrast ratios of 1,000,000:1, and adapt the irises to present us an image of 100,000:1 at any given time. Out LCD monitors on the other hand can typically only present us images of contrast ratios of 1,000:1, which are nowhere near making our eyes adapt to what's on screen. Some sort of HDR rendering with an iris effect is needed to show an image reprsentative of a world with a high contrast ratio.

» Tue May 29, 2012 12:12 pm

I believe this is because HDR and Bloom are both enabled by default, so disabling HDR doesn't stop Bloom from creating the blinding effect. Some third-party mods claim to disable bloom (I haven't checked). This is how Bethesda intended the game experience to be, so you'll likely have to use a third-party mod to alter this behavior. This may require waiting for the Creation Kit if this is all you want to do - rather than use a mod that alters other things as well.