Changes

::Free alternative to qUINT ReGrade, but qUINT ReGrade recommended instead of this one.

:Solaris is a physically based exposure and bloom solution. Together with ReGrade, they replicate the journey of light into the camera, onto the sensor and through the editing software. It uses various tricks to generate a physically plausible glow effect around bright light sources with very little performance overhead. It also supports masking objects by depth for better scene integration and make it look natural. For best practices, only use Solaris to adjust the scene brightness so ReGrade receives a well-balanced image to work with.

:Games use a pinhole lens camera model to render their images. As such, they do not exhibit the same visual effects seen in real cameras, and effects exclusive to those have to be artificially reintroduced. A Depth of Field (or DOF) filter simulates the blurring of out-of-focus areas in the image. In a real camera, many factors influence the appearance of of the DOF blur, or so-called “Bokeh”, which photographers and film makers use extensively as an artistic tool. This physical Depth of Field shader recreates this effect as faithfully as possible.

:Effects like unsharp mask are designed to sharpen or soften the image in a wider range, to enhance medium sized details in the image and give the content some grip. The balanced, yet contrasty look of movie posters and magazine covers is quite often partially achieved through this effect. Much research is going into the type of filters that enhance local contrast, from the most basic unsharp mask to state of the art “Local Laplacian” filtering.

Using this effect in realtime on video games allows to give blurry textures some bite, enhance the overall contrast of a scene or produce some pseudo Depth of Field effect to give the scene some depth. Clarity contains 2 different types of image enhancements, which can be used together.