Post-Processing Video Effects

Electronic games often use various visual effects that are applied after the scene is rendered by the game engine. These are used to make the game look better or just create a particular look. Improvements in graphics rendering technology often result in particular effects being used in games to excess; witness the fashion for lens flare in games from the mid- to late 1990s.

Common effects include:

• Lens Flare (see that entry for examples)
• Bloom: An effect that produces fringes of light around very bright objects in the scene. While this can affect human vision in certain conditions, it is generally implemented in ways that reproduce bloom effects on camera lenses and thus it is, strictly speaking, inappropriate unless the scene is intended to be viewed through a camera.
• Film grain: Adds graininess to the displayed image in order to evoke the look of an older film.
• Tone mapping: The remapping of on-screen colors into a more specific palette. (See Mood Lighting)
  • Monochrome filter: Turns the display black and white.
  • Sepia filter: Adds a brown tint to the display. Often used together with fake scratches to evoke the look of old films.
• Scanlines: Give the appearance of being displayed on an old CRT monitor.
• Cel Shading can be done this way, particularly when being done to live-action footage.
• Motion Blur: Gives the illusion an object is moving faster than it really is, disguises screen tearing and low frame rates, and makes a game look like it's being filmed with a camera.
• Depth of Field: Near or far objects blur away, depending on where you're focusing.
• Gaussian blur: Can be applied to distant objects to disguise object pop-in, applied to edges as a cheap form of anti-aliasing, or overlaid on top of the original frame to simulate bloom.
• Vignetting: Reducing the brightness or saturation of the corners while emphasizing and drawing interest to the center of the image.

Compare The Coconut Effect.

Examples of Post-Processing Video Effects include:

• Oblivion using high-end system settings: absolutely EVERYTHING is bloom-ed, with no logic whatsoever to it. Lower-end systems, unable to run that much bloom (or any bloom at all), get to experience a totally different-looking game. The logic is that it covers up distracts from the flaws in the character models.
  • Fallout 3 and New Vegas tone it down considerably to match the post-apocalyptic setting, but it's still there. An easily found source is plasma-based weapons; both the plasma bolts they fire and the little glowy bits on the guns themselves all have bloom effects. All the Gamebryo engine games as well as Skyrim have user-made enhanced shader mods that usually have the goal of making light sources look more important in providing the actual light of an area; this usually results in the light sources giving off more intense but "smaller" bloom compared to the unmodified effect.
• Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead and Fahrenheit/Fahrenheit (2005 video game) all use Film grain. In Mass Effect, the effect could be turned off in the options screen. Resident Evil 5 had one that could be unlocked when the player completed the game. In Left 4 Dead, there is a graphics setting for it, but it also fades out in bright areas automatically.
  • Which makes sense. When shooting on film, one needs to use more sensitive and fast film, but these stocks are grainier compared to the practically grain free stocks with lower sensitivity (that would be used when there is light).
• All cutscenes in Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth use this effect. Due to the gloomy and antiquated atmosphere of the game, it is fairly effective. In addition, the entire game had a noticeable brown tint to the graphics.
• House of the Dead: Overkill also uses the "film grain" effect. You can change the intensity of it in the options.
• Call of Duty 4 had unlockable sepia and monochrome filters. Applying the sepia filter in the heavily tinted level taking place after a nuclear explosion would actually turn the colours close to their normal look.
• Several Maxis games, including both of The Sims and Spore, have cheats that add photo effects to the screen, including sepia, grain, noir (true black and white) and bloom.
• Star Fox Adventures also includes an unlockable sepia filter.
• The Il-2 series of flight sims have some cutscenes rendered with the in-game engine where a sepia filter and artificial scratches have been added to imitate the look of a 1940s newsreel.
• Battle Stations: Pacific has an optional "old movie" filter which add scratches and grain to cutscenes.
• Day Of Defeat: Source uses Film grain between a player's death and his respawn, to evoke WWII films.
• Grand Theft Auto 4 has a number of tone mapping filters applied between buildings. You can notice the entire world change colour outside as you step inside certain buildings.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and The Lost and Damned has several more examples. Film grain pops up in the former during rainfall, while the latter uses its wholly.
• Battles in Persona 4 (where all battles, except for one dream sequence, take place inside a TV) have a filter applied to the picture while the player selects commands resembling a TV with poor reception.
• Sanitarium features flashbacks with film grain effects.
• Many of the special powers in Viewtiful Joe have film effects applied to accentuate the game's Trapped In The Movies vibe.
• Wet is specifically designed to look like a 70's movie, and therefore has a slight sepia filter, film artifacts and a couple of other random things.
• Uncharted uses a subtle amount of bloom, which increases (as the world becomes black and white) as you take damage as a form of ambient health meter. You can also unlock several filters to turn on including black and white, sepia, grainy, and "Realistic mode" which filters everything into dirt brown and drives the bloom up to insane levels
• Ico applies a "film grain" effect during certain scripted sequences. The European release allows enabling the effect throughout the game, if you want.
• Time Splitters: Future Perfect features a few of these as unlockable options. One puts an "old silent movie" filter onto the gameplay, while another makes the gameplay look like an old 8-bit game. The latter is unconvincing, and neither is recommended for gameplay.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time makes heavy use of bloom, to give the game that fairy-tale glow.
• Garry's Mod has a menu for post-processing effects.
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter uses an ever-so-subtile static filter during most of the gameplay to give the appearance of being viewed through an aged CRT monitor, as is fitting for the game's setting.
• Nie R. Oh GOD Nie R. I dare you to leave a dark area into a bright area without squinting/covering your eyes because of the bloom.
• Gears of War has various post processing filters available in the options menu.
• Just Cause 2 subtly changes the postprocessing depending on the environment. Red is emphasized in deserts and decreased in snowy areas, and in the former distant objects are more blurry.