Lifelike Reshade – Realistic Lighting and Color Grading (HDR compatible)
A realistic, lifelike ReShade preset focused on creating a grounded color and lighting system. Tuned using professional color grading techniques and works in all weather, time cycles, and environments. It delivers natural lighting, balanced colors, and subtle bloom.
Optimised to work in all weather, time cycles, and environments. Focused on natural lighting, balanced colors, and subtle bloom for a cinematic yet grounded experience.
My goal was too create this reshade without impacting the games intended brightness levels too much. Visibility is as expected during both day and night, indoors and outside.
Adjustments
White balance has been set as netural as possible, and exposure has been adjusted to compensate for the bloom.
Contrast has been bought up slightly while preserving the midtones.
Colour saturation and vibrance has been balanced.
A filmic tone LUT has been used at a very low intensity to bring everything together.
Bloom is subtle and compliments the games lighting system.
It also adds saturation in its exposed areas to mimic real life light casting, and the lights hue is dependent on the environment you’re in.
Installation Guide
Download my Reshade ini preset from the download tab on this page.
Place the ini file inside the Win64 folder located inside your game directory (…..\S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Stalker2\Binaries\Win64)
Download the latest Reshade from their website. Follow the instructions here if you’ve never used reshade before.
During effects installation, either select all shaders or use my ini file in the dialog box at the bottom to only install what you need for the preset
Launch the game, once loaded you can open Reshade with the Home key
Skip the tutorial, then load the “Vyyzz-StalkerRealismReshade” preset from the selection at the top of the pop up window
In your game graphics settings, turn sharpening to 0% (if using upscaling) and set your HDR black and white points to -10 and 1000
Performance
Expect a 5 to 7 FPS drop due to the Bloom, Anti Aliasing and Sharpening shaders.
No FPS impact if you disable the above and leave only the color shaders active.
My Settings: 2460×1440 // DLSS on Quality // Frame Gen // HDR on // Everything on Epic //
You MUST change the settings below in your graphics options to get the desired look
Sharpening: 0% (Reshade preset has a better sharpening fx loaded)
HDR: On
HDR Blackpoint: -10
HDR whitepoint: 1000
If you dont have HDR then adjust the brightness, exposure and contrast settings within the lightroom shader accordingly.
I will create a non-HDR version if enough people want it and are not comfortable editing reshade settings.
ini Settings (Optional)
I use the below ini settings to improve foliage LOD and shadows. Add these options to your Engine.ini file if you wish too.
[SystemSettings]
foliage.LODDistanceScale=3
foliage.DitheredLOD=1
fg.CullDistanceScale.Trees=3
fg.CullDistanceScale.Bushes=2.5
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096
r.Shadow.CSMCaching=1
r.DistanceFieldShadowing=1
r.DFShadowQuality=2
r.Shadow.FilterMethod=1
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.RayCountDirectional=5
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.SamplesPerRayDirectional=0
r.EyeAdaptation.ExponentialTransitionDistance=5
