Been quite a while since a new STEP has been released and recently the STEP facebook has stated there will be a new version out sometime this week. The screen shot looked fantastic, everything 1024 textures and running at 60 FPS. I have already deleted everything I have and am frothing at the mouth for the new guide

Sounds great; however, so far all the lighting/graphics mods I've checked out which affect lighting templates or ENB/FXAA profiles seem to look really strange in dungeons.

Think the "problem" with ENB and dungeons is because some dungeons take their lighting-patterns from daytime settings and some from nighttime settings. There is a mod called Dark Dungeons for ENB (and Further Dark Dungeons for ENB at the same site on Nexus) that work to remedy that.

And yes, I am looking forward to the new STEP version. I'm very happy with the way my game look already, but there's always mods I've missed and things I can do to keep the same level of graphics while getting better performance - and STEP is amazing as a core for your install.

Sorry, what is STEP?

It's basicly a (very detailed) guide to Skyrim graphic-mods, but also with a few gameplay/fixes in the .pdf aswell.
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11

And their forums (very useful for mod-reviews, performance hunting and such) at: http://forum.step-project.com/

Realistic Lighting offers just about any type of tweaking you can imagine via a simple ini. If you're willing to take the time to fiddle with the various settings for each area and time of day, you should be able to set it up so that it's what you want. ENB/FXAA shouldn't matter since it's a patcher.

I can vouch for this. I've never used a lighting mod that offered this amount of configurability. It really is a wondrous tool for fine-tuning the look of the game. Of course, as AiTenshi1 says, it can take some time to make the mod do exactly what you want. I guess I've probably spent about five or six hours tweaking my .ini (I actually enjoy fiddling with mod .ini's, don't ask me why). I'll probably continue to tweak as time goes on, but my game basically looks extremely close to the way I want it to look now. Thanks, Plutoman!

Thanks to realistic lighting and imaginator, I don't need to rely on 'hacks' like ENB or FXAA anymore. Call me paranoid, but using a modified d3d9.dll makes me queasy.

So is STEP an NON enb graphical improvement system? I have tried various enb setups but its just too damn dark 99% of the time.

It has nothing to do with ENB or any other such tools. It's a list of graphical (mostly) mods that fit in well with making Skyrim prettier, whilst keeping it (and making it even more) realistic. It makes it easier to find the best graphical mods, and helps with order to install them for best compatability etc. Just check out the link earlier in this thread and download the .pdf and see what it's about.