#gshade tutorial

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!

I did not forget about you!! You probably already figured it out by this time.

I actually sopped playing a little bit before this. I got sick of my game being buggy, plus my personal life got hectic. Haven't opened game in over a month...

It's my first day hopping back on so I took some screenshots for you if it still helps!! PLS forgive my absence :((((((((((((

**My game has not been updated since before the Fairies Expansion, and right now I'm running GSAHDE 5.1.6 (I've only updated my gshade once since downloading it in 2023)**

OPEN MENU > GAME OPTIONS > GRAPHICS > DIRECTX9 > APPLY CHANGES > EXIT

Turning this on then rebooting your game should bring gshade back. Or at least it worked for me. The next problem I had was some of my shaders would not work no matter what. This is what I have to do now every time I boot the game. It does not automatically turn on anymore...I'm still still looking into why

2. OPEN GSAHDE MENU (SHIFT + F2 FOR ME) > ADD ONS > LOOK AT THE HIGHLIGHTED SECTION

3. CHECK EITHER LAST BOX OR SECOND TO LAST BOX

Sometimes you will see more or less boxes each time you look. Normally, for me its either the last box or second to last box. I would suggest turning them on and off to see which one will bring all your shaders back. One box will make your game look completely weird. If you notice that uncheck that box of course!

VIOLAAAA!!!! <3333333

because I am unhinged and hate watching tutorials/reading instructions I wanted to make a quick guide on how I installed gshade! this guide is gonna assume you already removed reshade but if you haven’t yet please go and do that and backup your presets into a folder somewhere!! this is the video I watched for that

Install Gshade from their website >here< and run the .exe

Follow the wizard setup and select the game you want to install gshade on, in this case it’s the Sims 4 (usually in the Origin Games folder).

You will be prompted to input some settings:

You will then be asked to select a hooking, I selected Normal Mode for this, and my gshade is working fine so I don’t know the benefits of the others ✌️

I left all the other options as is and decided to not use the Final Fantasy presets that come with gshade. But if you want to use them you can.

Open up Gshade Control Panel on your desktop and click ‘TOOLS’. This is how to convert your reshade presets to gshade presets. Launch the converter and select the folder where you stored your presets.

Don’t worry as gshade will create a backup for you, but now the presets in that folder will be gshade compatible.

Move these presets into your game by The Sims 4> Game> Bin> gshade-presets> Custom (If you’re familiar with reshade you will find this easily)

And there you have it you have Gshade! Open up your game and see if it works if not then I have no idea why as this is the exact steps I took sorry! One thing I urge you to do though is after removing reshade open sims to MAKE SURE that you actually did remove it sucessfully, as you don’t want to have both. Gshade so far has been quicker and easier for me to use, it only just lagged a bit the first time I loaded my preset and set it up, but since then it’s been fine.  ✌️

Wait, what's that?

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.