I tend to usually be all for "realism" in games, but these two effects are annoying, and I'd rather play without them.

The pupil adjustment effect is much too slow, and your eyes are already doing it outside the game when the ingame lighting changes, which makes it superfluous and annoying.

Bloom on the other hand makes the game look blurry and dreamlike instead of realistic, and just looks silly. Our brain has sophisticated mechanisms built in just to ignore the blurriness and defects in our own vision, so getting them forced on you by the game is fairly frustrating.

I've been trying to disable these two effects since I got the game around the launch day, but haven't found a proper way to do this. The HDR settings in the .ini-files don't seem to affect much of anything. The pupil dilation effect looks to be tied to the Imagespaces the game uses for lighting and weather, and there seems to be no way to disable it outside of editing the Imagespaces individually.
Bloom might work similarly, as the bloom settings in the .inis seem to do jack.

Anyone looked at disabling this stuff? It's my number 2 annoyance after the horribad UI, which has luckily gotten improved majorly by modders by now. Would be nice to get rid of this [censored], as "HDR" is something I tend to disable as a first thing in any game I play, and for whatever reason that's not possible with Skyrim.

On a positive note, at least they didn't include lens flares...

I believe the enb series mod can disable the HDR effect and the realistic lighting mod gets rid of bloom I think.

edit:Just double-checked the realistic lighting readme to see if it removes bloom and it does. Not 100% on the enb one though since I don't use it but I think I read somewhere that it does.

I could agree it's a bit strong in the game, but it's also there to help against the limited brightness range monitors have. If you force all light levels to fit in the limited range that's available in monitors, then you'll have trouble making dark dungeons and bright sunny days, while allowing both to be equally playable. It allows the game to render in a high range of brightness, far higher than a monitor can hope to display, with a moving center-point (a lower center-point in a dark scene, a higher center-point in a bright scene, and dynamically shift between them in real-time).

The same idea applies here, to compensate for the limited brightness range available to monitors. Without bloom, you'd not be able to differentiate between bright and really bright pixels because they both use the same full intensity on the monitor. Letting the really bright pixels artificially "bleed" into neighboring pixels helps you tell the difference.

That said, Oblivion and Skyrim do overdo it a tad. Hopefully the shaders can be rewritten to make it more subtle and "realistic".

The problem with the "Realistic lighting" mod is that it makes the game much too dark. And I'm heavily into photography, so yes, my monitor is calibrated correctly. It'd be realistic if there was moonlight and starlight to compensate for the darker nights, and if the game had a mechanism for your "eyes" to actually adjust to near-darkness, instead of just flailing around the brightness wildly, like the default "pupil" effect does now. Also, LCD monitors don't have enough grays to do "near-darkness" well, HDR [censored]-clownery or not.
And... Despite what some people seem to think, more dark doesn't automatically mean more awesome.


It's true that TFT displays have a limited gamut, particularly a limited range of grays, but highlighting really-bright-pixels by making more really bright-pixels doesn't work that well and just has the effect of obscuring your view. 3D games have for a long time done just fine in displaying bright sunny days and dark dungeons. HDR is just a slapped-on gimmick, like lens flare was. They both simulate something that cinematographers and photographers and the related industries have spent millions upon millions of dollars and man-hours to get rid of. HDR does have it's place in photography, where the term actually means something(if used in moderation), but in games... *brrr*

It is funny how software developers spend millions trying to simulate visual effects that other people spend millions trying to get rid of. That's art for ya, though... not the first time people use "destructive" artifacts on purpose for artistic effect, and won't be the last.

I would be interested in seeing what kind of HDR effects can be done that won't rely so heavily on the "pupil effect", and finding a subtler bloom. I like being able to tell "bright" from "really bright", but I think compressing the range too much would mainly serve to reduce the contrast, making it too washed out and "unreal" (it can look really good in photographs if done well, but actual video where you're going from really dark to really bright and a number of places in-between may be troublesome).

Can't you simply disable HDR and Bloom by doing ini tweaks?
[BlurShaderHDR]
bDoHighDynamicRange=1 (change to 0)
[BlurShader]
bUseBlurShader=0

EDIT: Or you can use this mod: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4323

Nope. Already tried that. Like I mentioned in the 1st post, those settings don't seem to do much of anything. Most of the "HDR" is baked into the weather and lighting model used by the game.


That's the "Realistic Lighting" mod discussed earlier. It doesn't seem to affect the HDR pupil dilation effect in any way. And it has other big disadvantages. Had you read the thread through, you'd have noticed why it isn't a solution. It does remove bloom, but that's the only benefit I personally see from it.

I know how to solve the problem you're wanting, the problem is it's more work than I'd like to do. If you'd like to PM me, I could run you through the basics in tessnip to change the data? It's not all that difficult and you could do it in under an hour or two.

I know the issues inside Realistic Lighting; if it helps, I'd say to keep an eye on it, because when the CK comes out I want to write scripts up to vary brightness and lighting based on the moon phases. It's already much brighter with the aurora borealis, but it's balanced more around a new/quarter moon than anything else.

Thanks! Much appreciated. I wasn't aware that the FOMM tessnip was usable with Skyrim. PM on the way.

Right, I've got a quick and dirty mod disabling bloom and the eye adaptation done, thanks to the excellent help and documentation by Pluto.
I'll test it out for a while in case it borks up the lighting in certain cells, or decides to feast on babies or something to that effect, and then release the thing in case someone else needs it.

Glad to help.

I doubt it'll mess up any of the lighting, the worst it'll do is make some of the areas feel slightly dimmer. The game doesn't rely on any of the eye adaption. Could make word walls act a bit strange, though. That really depends on how much is from the imagespace modifier, or the imagespace itself.