A new ReShade preset that emulates the look and feel of a VHS tape for Cyberpunk 2077 is earning plaudits on social media. The grainy, analog-tape-worn scenes shown in an embedded sample video on Reddit (below) make this graphically stunning game so 1980s-real you start watching for mullets. The preset is the work of Redditor Tulired, who was humble enough to ponder whether “something is missing” and reach out for opinions and ideas for improvement.
“One day I just started to research into how & what makes VHS look the way it does and after that thought ‘Hey maybe I can try to make Reshade Preset’,” wrote Redditor Tulired earlier this week. They went on to explain that they wanted to go for a more realistic than stylistic visual style. So, they avoided clichéd over-use of mechanical errors and finely balanced “other things like ghosting, chroma bleed / smear, Limited bandwidth for colors, muddy black floor, phosphor trails, NTSC stuff, color noise, blurriness and halo / ringing effect.”
With experience of video in the VHS era, I reckon they did a great job. Echoing some of the comments, the on-screen action could be a segment of a 1980s drive-time news report. That is, if you ignore the audioscape.
VHS ReShade vs actual VHS
Another Redditor thought it would be interesting to record some Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay on an actual VHS tape recorder and see what it looked like.
Inspired by Tulired’s recent work on the ReShade preset, Gundog48 shared this recording (embedded above). It isn’t as pleasing to watch, to my eye. The problem is that all the modern neon visuals seem to be leeched too badly by the real VHS, which is like dramatically turning down the quality rather than adjusting a visual feel.
Gundog48 admits they gave this recording the worst treatment. For example, they used “a very old cassette recorded in EP mode, so very low quality!” Moreover, a “cheap” HDMI-to-composite adapter contributed to the visual degradation.
A ReShade refresher
If you aren’t familiar, ReShade is an independently produced generic post-processing injector for PCs that works with APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. In brief, ReShade acts as a final filter layer upon the game title’s rendered output. Files can be shared that apply certain ReShade recipes with adjustments to visual aspects such as ambient occlusion, depth of field, color, antialiasing, sharpening, blurs, film grain, chromatic aberration, and more.
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