#gshade guide

Have you ever struggled with the ReShade menu getting in the way when you're editing your screenshots? And have you ever wanted to up your virtual photography game and improve your compositions?

You only need two free shaders to improve your ReShade quality of life, speed up your editing process, and make sure you're getting the best compositions possible.

Want a nice cut-out picture? transparent chromakey shots are here to save the day!

You can achieve this with a combination of two features in gshade: ChromaKey, a technique that generates a greenscreen effect:

and Clear Alpha Channel, a setting at the very bottom of the Home tab:

Ready? So here's the step-by-step: first, make sure Chromakey.fx is placed right after FFRestoreUI.fx. Also, check if the Keying Color is set to Alpha Transparency.

Next, set up your scene and position your subject with some clearance around it for the chromakey effect.

Now, make sure the Clear Alpha Channel setting is disabled, and enable the Chromakey.fx filter. After that, adjust its distance in the Definitions panel, like this:

You want to cover as much as possible of the background without cutting into the subject itself. While the only thing you'll see in-game is a black background, the final screenshot will actually replace it with proper transparency!

(Important: make sure to re-enable the Clear Alpha Channel setting after taking your shots, otherwise you may end up with a bunch of fully transparent pictures!)

Chromakeyed, transparent images can be used in several different situations! For example, I often use it to create tutorial slides:

What about reference cards for art commissions?

Or maybe stickers with your friends. Or Discord emotes. Or whatever strikes your fancy. The sky's the limit!

External textures open up an amazing world of possibilities: think superimposed visual effects, or custom stickers (like logos or decoration)!

So grab a coffee and let’s learn how to use them for a simple but powerful purpose: custom backgrounds!

But first, what’s a texture? In short, a texture is simply an image, like a .jpg or .png file, that you can load and use within the 3D space for different purposes. In broader 3D terms, it means the 'skin' you wrap a 3D model's wireframe surface around.

(You can learn more about the broader meaning of texture mapping with this handy video.)

Now, back to GShade - we can’t replace in-game textures, but we can add new elements to the 3d space within the game and apply custom textures. So here's the step-by-step:

1 - Locate the Custom Textures folder

Tap the Windows key to open the Windows prompt, type the following line, and press Enter:

%SystemDrive%\Users\Public\GShade Custom Shaders\Textures

This will open an Explorer window listing all the custom textures available for GShade to use.

Now, the good stuff™: you can install new textures simply by copying new files into this folder!

2 - Load and Show a Custom Texture

Open GShade, locate a shader named Stagedepth, and enable it:

(Leave the number of StageDepths to 1, that's enough for now.)

Now look out for a little widget called Preprocessor Definitions, and expand it.

We need to inform 3 parameters:

StageTex (the name of the texture we want to use)

STAGE_SIZE_X (the width, in pixels, of the image we’re loading, or the BUFFER_WIDTH keyword for full-screen width), and

STAGE_SIZE_Y (same, but for height, or BUFFER_HEIGHT).

For now, let’s use one of the textures installed by default. Locate and enable StageDepth, and use this value (and make sure to use double-quotes around the texture name):

StageTex: "LensSprite.png"

And hopefully, you'll see something like this:

Now play with the shader’s sliders, especially the 'Depth' value since it allows you to determine how close or far the texture will be placed. (Remember, you can always right-click on a GShade control to open up a context menu with the ‘reset to Default’ option.)

If you got to this point - congratulations! You just loaded your first custom texture into GShade. I’m proud of you!

Time to put your safety goggles on - we’ll use Depth to project the texture away, and use in-game scene set-up to match the injected background composition. Here's the image I'll use, generated with MidJourney:

Since we can’t modify the texture itself, we need to make sure our scene setup matches aspects of the injected background like color and contrast. (It can be modified by GShade filters, though, so you can apply effect like Blur by placing StageDepth closer to the top of the filter list):

First, the scene setup...

Now, enable a preset - in this case, Neneko Jolt:

Enable StageDepth and specify the custom texture in StageTex, so it automatically loads...

...and place StageDepth before the ADOF filter, so its bokeh effect applies to the texture as well:

...and presto! Now you have a beautifully merged custom background.