Which reshade settings are essential for a good look? Like which settings are the most important?
This (Sims 4) picture ^ above was taken with Reshade 3.0.8 and then only resized and sharpened in PS. These Reshade settings were used: DOF, FXAA, SMAA, MXAO, Cartoon, DPX, Gaussian Blur, Clarity, Curves, Levels, Ambient Light, and Bloom.
No settings are important, as it’s just what you prefer. The ones I bolded are what I use in most of my Reshade presets. Here is an explanation of them if you don’t know what they are:
DOF: This makes the background blurred and the foreground object not blurred. It basically gives some depth to pictures.
MXAO: Ambient occlusion. It adds shadows basically. When you use this, you have to turn off edge-smoothing and post processing for it to work.
FXAA: Edge smoothing/ anti-aliasing. Less effective than SMAA, but SMAA doesn’t work when you have some other Reshade settings active. This is useful to use alongside MXAO since you have to turn the in-game edge smoothing off for it.
Cartoon: Kinda gives an outline to objects. I just like it because when I sharpen and resize my final product, it gives a clean edge to everything.
DPX: You can change contrast, brightness, saturation, color and vibrance with this. It’s basically the exposure and most of the other adjustments part of PS.
Clarity: It’s a less intensive and more broad version of sharpening. It darkens already kind of dark areas and gives the illusion of small, but detailed shadows.
Bloom: This makes light sources brighter to emulate light. It extends light sources, makes them pour over and makes the illusion of a brighter light source. You can also change the color of the bleed in both ambient light and bloom setting. In the above picture, the bloom is the pinkish/purple bright light you see.
Ambient Light: This is kind of hard to explain. It’s somewhat similar to bloom, but it affects and lightens the whole area instead of using a light source like bloom does.
