Thread by @LeonAquitaine

Starter GPose hints: Presets and GShade pipeline

There is a part of a preset creator's work that is often ignored or underappreciated, and a GShade function that can inadvertently mess with it. So let's talk about the filter pipeline and how it works!

#ffxiv #gpose #gposeguide

A preset is, at its heart, an ordered list of filters (and their configuration, or modifiers). Each does their work and then passes it along to the next in line; only active filters (the ones highlighted and with a checkbox marked) will do anything.

For FFXIV, that means that presets always start with FFKeepUI - an operation that saves the current UI in a buffer - and ends with FFRestoreUI, which writes the UI back to the image (so the effects applied to the whole image are ignored for UI elements only.)

What happens if UI elements aren't restored? Well, in some cases it's a (very non-interactive) mess!

Now, here's the kicker - awesome creators like @Xelyanne actually place some optional filters (with fine-tuned settings to boot) in-between those two that you can activate just by tapping their checkboxes, to amazing results!

That's the reason why you shouldn't click the 'Active to Top' button when using a preset; it reorders the pipeline, moving the (carefully selected) filters out of place and messing with the preset creator's work.

Here's an example, using Neneko Universe's Lorelei preset from the Abyssal Melody collection. The picture's settings are as follows:

- Standard, no modifiers
- ADOF+Bubble
- ADOF+Bubble, Chromatic Aberration + Copyright

And it ends with a close-up composition.

And that's the moment when you suddenly realize that there's a veritable treasure trove of configuration options, carefully curated by preset creators, available to you with a single click! Give it a try, and enjoy even richer compositions.