PotPlayer shader : Smart Vibrance

Good morning everyone, i am here to share this shader that i created for PotPlayer !

The main difference between a PC monitor and a TV rely on the vividness of colours, brights but without being annoying, simply pleasant to look at, almost all TV manufacturers in fact literally compete to see who can capture the buyer's attention by offering increasingly brighter colours, on the other hand instead, pc monitors colorisation tend to be almost bleak compared to even the poorest tv model, "but why ?" you might be wondering :

Year after year this brilliance competition has gradually led video content distributors to decrease the color saturation which is automatically compensated by the aforementioned televisions "pumping filters" active by default, furthermore even smartphones have a function to automatically increase this factor in the exact same way as TVs (it's not because they are just "oled" panels).

PC monitors, unlike TVs, do not always have these algorithms for color improvement integrated, the pc world follow a precise and regulated standard for professional reasons and have always favored speed of response to input, some monitors also suffer more than the others in color representation because of the type of panel itself (ips vs va, classic example), so in fact we find ourselves with "naturally washed out" colors (its not only a problem due to the conversion of the color range from 16-235 to 0-255 but also to the resizing mechanism).

You probably tried to compensate this by :
Using the "digital brilliance" slider in the nvidia control panel contributes indiscriminately to burning out most of the colors, losing detail in the lighter areas.
Fiddling with contrast and brightness wich makes you lose details in darker areas.
Changing the video renderer (madshivr) and other tricks to preserve integrity and improve scalers (resizing lead to color washout).

But... nothing really worked in the right way and enough is enough !

I decided to "patch" this situation by creating a shader that work best with vanilla setups, it dynamically modifies the saturation of the colors while maintaining the overall tonal balance perceived proportion derived from a study related to the perception of primary colors and the correlation to the quantity emitted by the display, for example red, blue and green are perceived quantitatively differently by the retina and compensated differently by the brain, those consideration are already implemented on the aforementioned tv algorythms.

But how does this shader work ?
It does apply a certain amount (boost) of saturation (vibrance) on all colors except those that are above a (configurable) threshold beyond which the effect gradually decreases until reaching zero in order to preserve luminance and shades of colors in the light areas.
Applies a gradual color correction based on the amount of boost applied.
In addition to this, in order to avoid saturating and transforming gray scales into almost totally blacks, it has a filter that identifies when a color approaches (or is) a gray scale and applies a more aggressive boost reduction in order to preserve the details and intelligibility of very dark scenes.

Extensively commented code.
Boost, threshold (upper, lower & curve) configurable as desired.
The default configuration is "big ass tv wannabe".
The final effect is damn similar if not identical to "RTX Dynamic Vibrance" but without the need to have a GPU with AI cores.

At this link you can find the file to download (and an identical version ported for reshade to be used with videogames) :

https://github.com/aston89/Smart-Vibrance-for-PotPlayer/tree/main

Preview :


[Attachment 79145 - Click to enlarge]


UPDATE V2 : Updated the shader, which in some circumstances generated artifacts due to the way it arbitrarily decided whether a color was a grayscale, now applies a gradual alteration of saturation for a better transition between grayscales and colors while maintaining the same amount of saturation, the shader was created and modeled targeting FullHD material but is now fully compatible even with old anime encoded in HD/SD especially if with old codecs


[Attachment 79175 - Click to enlarge]

(notice the artifacts on the left hairs)