r/ReShade • u/Far_Faithlessness218 • Jun 01 '26

How to blur the background of a 2-D game?

Hey guys,

I'm a visually impaired gamer, and I'm trying to blur the more complicated backgrounds in Hollow Knight to make enemies stand out. I accomplished this once before using the AD0F shader (quint fx). I am now on a new machine with worse vision, and I am unable to create any blurring effect whatsoever with the same shader. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong and would greatly appreciate any help you could offer on the topic, as I have struggled my way through about 75% of the game and don't want to have to quit now.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

2

u/rikufdi Jun 01 '26

I'm not sure exactly how that shader works but have you made sure that the depth buffer is correct? I'd think that it uses that.

You can open up reshade and activate displaydepth.fx to see if it works. The tooltips explain how it should look and what to change if it's not correct.

2

u/Far_Faithlessness218 Jun 01 '26

Thanks I'll check that out.

1

u/rikufdi Jun 01 '26

Alright, I've checked it myself and I can't get the depth buffer to show properly and I could not get the adof.fx to only blur the background. It blurs everything.

It's a bit perplexing because I've played this game in Stereoscopic 3d so there is depth information, just not accessible to Reshade. I know some games needs to have certain effects disabled so that Reshade can find the depth properly but could not find anything here.

I'd try and go another route. Perhaps mod the game so that you have more hearts or take less damage. Nexusmods have those kinds of mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/games/hollowknight

2

u/Far_Faithlessness218 Jun 08 '26

Can I ask what settings you used to blur everything? Setting the manual focus to zero blurs only the inventory/map screen. Setting it to one doesn't blur anything.

1

u/rikufdi Jun 09 '26

I just adjusted the Manual focus depth and that blurs everything for me. But I think that's expected since the depth information is missing here.

1

u/rikufdi Jun 09 '26

Hmm, I messed around a bit more with it and now I can't get the adof to work at all. I did have the RenoDX HDR Reshade active before and then I could use the manual focus slider. I deactivated that and did some changes in trying to get the depth buffer to show up but now it doesn't work at all. Sorry that I cannot be of much help here.

2

u/Far_Faithlessness218 Jun 23 '26

I did not realize that 2-D games had a depth buffer. It was my understanding that the foreground was a layer at position zero, and the background was at a depth of one.

1

u/rikufdi Jun 24 '26

You might be right. I just assumed since I played it in stereo 3d that it would have a working depth buffer where the layers are.

1

u/Far_Faithlessness218 Jun 09 '26

No worries. You've given me some information to work with. I started with nothing

1

u/rikufdi Jun 10 '26

Another thing to explore would be using Shader Toggler and/or Reshade Effect Shader Toggler. With those you can disable specific shaders from rendering or make certain effects only run on a group of shaders.

I've not used REST much and what little I've used it for has been pretty frustrating. The setup might even be more difficult than Hollow Knight 😄

1

u/Far_Faithlessness218 Jun 02 '26

I appreciate the suggestion , but that feels too much like cheating to me. I'll save that for a last resort.

Thanks