While waiting for native HDR support implemented by Bethesda, modders have decided to take the lead with a convincing proposal.
If Starfield wasn’t released in as dire a state as other Bethesda titles, leaving several basic features missing when the long-awaited space RPG launched last September.
We know that future updates are planned by the studio to add Nvidia’s DLSS, field of view adjustment as well as HDR calibration. And it is this last option which has just been implemented by a team of modders wanting to provide native support for HDR and much more.
Starfield is beautified thanks to modding on PC
As a reminder, HDR (for high dynamic range) provides more detail in shadow areas as well as in the brightest areas. If your screen or television supports the HDR10 standard (the only one present on PC at the moment), you can in theory benefit closer to what the human eye can see, both in terms of light and colorimetry.
The Luma – Native HDR mod adds native HDR support to the game, and not a simple emulation of 10-bit color coding as was the case until now. The modders therefore extensively rewrote the game’s rendering engine to add the functionality.
And they didn’t stop there: Luma also fixes the game’s colorimetry, gamma settings as well as banding effects on gradients without betraying the original creative intention. The rendering of blacks is also deeper, to the delight of owners of OLED screens.
The team promises a much more precise implementation than enabling Auto HDR on PC or even enabling HDR on the Xbox version. One of the authors of the mod is none other than Pumbo, a developer at Remedy who notably worked on the implementation of HDR in the highly anticipated Alan Wake 2.
To install Luma, however, you will need to use the Starfield Script Extender (SFSE), a tool allowing you to install more complex mods for the game. You can then place the mod files in the Starfield root folder before launching sfse_loader.exe, new options related to HDR will be present in the game menu.
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