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Clarity

Local Contrast Enhancement

Effects like unsharp mask are crafted to sharpen or soften images across a broader spectrum, enhancing medium-sized details and providing a more tactile feel to the content. This effect often contributes to the balanced yet striking appearance of movie posters and magazine covers.

Extensive research is dedicated to filters that boost local contrast, ranging from simple unsharp masks to advanced “Local Laplacian” filtering techniques. Implementing these effects in real-time in video games can add definition to blurry textures, enrich scene contrast, or guide viewer attention.

Why Clarity?

Texture Detail

Texture enhances small, high-frequency detail by giving it more tonal range. Its influence is subtle yet effective and can be used to combat the overly blurry and hazy appearance that, e.g., Temporal Anti-Aliasing in newer games produces. It’s something you enable and forget about, yet rub your eyes once it’s off.

Note how the edges of the objects are unaffected, yet the perceived clarity of the textures increases dramatically. You can also use it as a softening filter with a negative intensity. 

Local Contrast

Local Contrast brightens dark areas and tones down bright regions, depending on their relative darkness compared to surrounding scenes. This sets a local operator apart from global contrast adjustments agnostic to scene content. Adding Local Contrast flattens the image without affecting the object’s fidelity.

However, Local Contrast can also be removed from the image. This transforms the image oppositely, giving it a dreamy look with deep shadows.

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