Setting up Reshade

Reshade is a powerful post-processing system with a lot of features. To get the most out of Reshade, it's key to set it up properly for the game you're using it with. This guide is written for Reshade v4.2. If you're using an older version, some information might still apply, but that's not guaranteed.

This guide is written for screenshotting. This means it doesn't really go into topics like performance mode as the game is likely paused when you're going to set up your shot and the Reshade configuration you want to use for it.

Video

If you prefer video guidance, Framed member TheGordinho Ochinchin made a video guiding you through the basic steps

Setting up Reshade for the game

To set up Reshade for a game, and not having the game running, we first have to download it from the Reshade website. After you've downloaded the .exe and started it, it will open a small program that will guide you through the process. Simply pick the game's .exe file as the first step.

After that it should pick the right rendering API. If it fails to do so, simply pick DirectX 11 if it's a rather new game. The last step is that it will ask you to download a set of shaders. If you're new to Reshade and don't have anything configured yet, it's best to download all shaders from the main repository on GitHub. If you decide not to download any shaders, at least download the DisplayDepth shader as it helps with setting up Reshade properly.

After this, Reshade is ready to roll. Starting the game will show a banner at the top that Reshade is active. It also shows which key combination to press to open the menu, which you'll need for the next section.

Configuring Reshade

When Reshade is setup and running in the game, you can open its menu. Newer Reshade versions use the HOME key to open the menu. If you copied a Reshade configuration you might have to use Shift-F2.

After opening the menu it might first show you the tutorial if you're new. The tutorial will set you up with a preset and tell you what all the parts are for. If you decided to download shaders when setting up Reshade you'll see all the techniques these shaders contain listed in a nice order on the Home tab. You can assign hotkeys for each technique by right-clicking the name and clicking in the textbox next to Toggle Key.

Pressing the toggle key will then activate/deactivate the technique. To activate/deactivate a technique, e.g. DisplayDepth, you can also check the checkbox in front of the technique name with the mouse. When a technique is active, its controls are listed at the bottom of the Home tab. You can drag the horizontal blue bar upwards to make some space.

By default the menu is docked at the left side of the screen. This might be problematic if you want to look at a part that's covered by the menu. To be able to move the menu, you can drag a tab (like the DX11 tab) off the menu and then add all other tabs to that tab to create a floating menu. Be sure not to dock a tab to the side of the screen. So when an icon appears to dock the tab to one side of the screen be sure to avoid dropping the tab on that icon.

You can re-arrange the tabs in the floating menu by dragging the tab headers to the left or right. This way you can create a floating menu with the tabs in the order you want. You can move the menu around by clicking anywhere in the menu and simply dragging it to some point.

When you now disable and enable the menu again, it will stay a floating menu and you can drag it around to any spot you want.

Order of execution

The techniques on the Home tab seem to be listed in a random order, but that's not the case. The order of execution is from top to bottom. This means that if you have the techniques CinematicDOF and LumaSharpen active and listed in that order from top to bottom, Reshade will first execute CinematicDOF and after that LumaSharpen. This has the effect that the result of CinematicDOF will be used as input for LumaSharpen.

What the right order is for you depends on your taste, however in general the rule of thumb is that any color oriented technique should be executed before any lens oriented technique (like a Depth of Field shader, or a filmgrain or overlay shader).

Setting up global preprocessor definitions.

Reshade uses a couple of global preprocessor definitions which have an impact on how techniques work. E.g. how the depth buffer looks like. You can edit these definitions by clicking the blue 'Edit global preprocessor definitions' button right at the top of the technique parameters on the Home tab. What these settings mean is explained in the section Checking depth buffer access.

Reshade settings

You can configure the various settings of Reshade on its Settings tab. For us screenshotters the Screenshots section is particularly important. The key to use shouldn't interfere with other overlays you're using, e.g. Steam, UPlay and the like, and you should pick a file format that works for you best, e.g. png is lossless and you can upload it everywhere. It's fairly self-explainatory.

Changing a technique's parameters

So you're all set, ready to rock but how to change a technique's settings? To do so, first activate the shader by either pressing the Toggle key you defined or by checking the checkbox in front of the technique's name on the Home tab. You'll see that Reshade will display all settings for a shader below the blue splitter bar on the Home tab.

When you see a slider, you can drag these by using your mouse. If you see a numeric textbox you can change that value also with the mouse, by simply clicking in the textbox, holding left-mousebutton and dragging the mouse either left or right. When you hold shift while dragging these sliders and dragboxes, the value will increase/decrease faster. When you hold ctrl and click, you'll get a textbox which allows you to type in the value. This can be beneficial if you want to specify a value that's higher or lower than the range set for the control.

Checking depth buffer access

To make sure you have setup the depth buffer properly, it's key to have the DisplayDepth shader installed. Activating the DisplayDepth shader will show you a proper overview of how the depth buffer looks and whether or not you have picked the right preprocessor definition values. There's a great tutorial over on the Reshade forums of how to use the DisplayDepth shader to setup the depth buffer properly, so it's recommended to read it and setup your Reshade configuration properly. You have to do this only once per game.

Picking the right depth buffer

It might be the game uses multiple depth buffers that might be useful, or it switches depth buffers on the fly for the final image and therefore it looks like the depth buffer isn't available. To tell Reshade which depth buffer to use, you have to go into an additional tab in the Reshade overlay. It depends on which version of Reshade you're using, which tab that is.

For Reshade v4.x or lower: If you're using a Reshade version of v4.x or lower, the Reshade menu/overlay contains an additional tab, which is either called D3D9, D3D10, D3D11 or D3D12.
For Reshade v5.x or higher: If you're using Reshade version 5.x, Reshade contains an additional tab called Add-ons.

This additional tab shows all currently active depth buffers. To see which one you should select, first enable the DisplayDepth shader. You likely either see a white or a black screen. When you go to the additional tab mentioned above in the Reshade menu/overlay you can then pick the right depth buffer by checking its checkbox (or by trying the Copy depth before clearing checkbox). If the screen becomes what it should be, you picked the right depth buffer and you can use it with the techniques that depend on it.

Shader duplication

There are cases where you would want to use one shader more than once (CanvasFog and StageDepthPlus shaders are popular in that regard). With most shaders all you need to do is replace the technique name in the shader code to a different one, but some shaders will need to change the name of a namespace or a texture name, so be aware of that. Be sure to check the shaders code for comments regarding duplicating the shader.

Depth buffer on online games

When the game is an online game or actively performs network access, the depth buffer is disabled. Access to the depth buffer is often required as a lot of effects use the depth buffer of the game. Reshade actively disables access to the depth buffer if it detects the game to be an online game (so there's network traffic on a regular basis). If the depth buffer isn't available in the game, because of this, the shaders that depend on that will likely fail.

So if you are trying to use reshade in a game which uses the internet connection constantly (because of the DRM or because it's always online like The Division or Steep) you will have to use custom reshade .dlls builds to get depth buffer access, otherwise reshade will block it. Alternatively you can still use reshade without depth buffer access, but some shaders that use it like CinematicDof won't work.

Keep in mind that the official version of reshade is whitelisted by some games anti-cheat software, so by using a custom .dll you may get banned depending on the game, so do your research beforehand.

Using reshade alongisde other injectable mods

Sometimes you may encounter that you can't use reshade alongside another mod that also injects itself into the process. One way of avoiding this is using ASI Loader to put the extra mods in a scripts folder. Read the README file on the ASI Loader repo for more information on how to use it.