[sebastien lagarde]

Hello,

I am curious to hear about what order game use for post processing, HDR effect and antialising.

As Post effect I mean:
- Glare effect (bloom, star, lens flare),
- Tone mapping
- lightshaft/godray/lightbeam
- gamma correction
- blue shift
- antialiasing (hardware or software)
- Depth of Field (DOF)
- motion blur
- color correction(contrast, hue, brightness, saturation)

Gamma correction will be obviously always the last effect.
I assumed that Motion Blur and DoF are done in HDR and not in LDR for
better quality (see crysis talk : "Finding next gen" at GDC 2008).

It seems that color correction (contrast, hue, brightness, saturation) is better
to be done in HDR too cause it has better precision (HDR book from reinhard)

The thread is not about performance but about visual quality.

Some post process need to be done in specific order like outlined by shaderx6 article on post tone mapping to avoid aliasing

In the article of shader X6 "post tone mapping in DX10", order is as this:

MSAA the scene
ToneMap all pixel
Resolve the MSAA
Do gamma correction

In DirectX SDK the HDR sample do this:

Blue Shift
ToneMap
Add glare effect (bloom, star)

In my game I do:

MotionBlur
DOF
Edge AA on the scene
Add bloom + lightshaft
Tonemap
color correction (in LDR)
Gamma correction

Is there physical statement about adding bloom effect after or before tone map. Is software AA best done before tone map like for hardware MSAA or after?
Color correction better in HDR ?
Some seems to reduce bloom separately based on same exposure that is use in tone mapping, then combine with tone mapped pixel.
Plenty of question like that

Thanks for your help.

Lagarde Sébastien.