Expanded version of the ENB binary reference from Silent Skies' modpage.
The base ENB parameters are the one on the left side of the GUI (under enbseries.ini).
I'm only going to give a brief overview of the categories and won't go into too much details, because it would take me hours to write down every value that is available (there are over 650 or something like that atm and this number will only increase as time goes on.... madness). If I didn't list a specific category you probably shouldn't mess with it unless you know what you are doing.
Remember, I'm not Boris and can only tell you either what I read about the different effects or what I found out by testing. The internal workings are only available to the ENB master himself.
[EFFECT]
You can turn on/off entire effects here. Want to use the lens effects? Tick the "EnableLens" box! Want to disable the DoF? Untick the "EnableDepthOfField" box. It's that simple.
For Silent Horizons only the adaption time parameter works here. If you want instant adaption use a low value and if you want more realistic eye adaption use a higher value.The rest is handled by the enbadaption.fx file (and you don't want to edit that thing trust me).
Same for the DoF values. Here only the focusing time works. If you want faster focusing decrease the "FocusingTime" parameter and if you want slower focusing do the exact opposite.
[BLOOM] + [LENS]
Controls the amount of bloom or how strong the lens effect should be per time of day.
Stars - The "Animated stars" effect has some weird results with certain night sky textures, but you can try if it works for you.
The remaining star specific values impact the look of the star texture.
AuroraBorealis - Impacts the look of the aurora borealis (even at this time of the year).
Gradient - This controls the color and intensity of the sky. If it has top, middle or horizon in the name it will only impact that specific area of the sky.
Clouds - Impacts the look of the clouds. The edge parameter is responsible for the iluminated edges of clouds when the sun is behind them.
Sun and Moon - Will impact how bright they shine and in which color they do it.
DirectLighting - The light that comes from the direction of the sun/moon. Has no impact in interiors (and if it does something is wrong with that cell).
AmbientLighting - Light with no direction. Comes from every side and illuminates everything no matter where it is.
PointLighting - Light that comes from spells, fires, torches, etc. Almost all light (except ambient) in interiors gets controlled with thpse parameters.
Specular - Controls the reflections. Those values get used by most items and the environment iirc. The higher the "power" values the brighter a lightsource has to be to trigger a reflection and the higher the "amount" value is the brighter the reflection will be.
Fog - Controls the amount and the curve/brightness of the fog.
ColorPow - Adds a sort of gamma curve to all diffuse textures.
[SSAO_GAME]
Increase or decrease the vanilla AO amount (if you still have it enabled in your configs/launcher)
[SSAO - SSIL]
- Most parameters here should be left on their default values for Silent Horizons!
-> The average user should only tweak intensity/amount, because everything else can have some unwanted side effects.
UseIndirectLighting - Enables the indirect lighting.
EnableComplexFilter - Activates a more accurate AO filter.
EnableDenoiser - Enables a special denoising filter.
UseSelfIntersecting - Enables the newer DX11 exclusive ENB SSAO variant.
FilterBluriness - How much blur should be applied to the final AO output.
SourceTexturesScale and ResolutionScale - Changes the resolution of internal rendertargets for the AO computation.
SamplingQuality - Controls the overall accuracy/quality of the AO sampling.
SamplingRange - Impacts how far away from the source the AO should sample.
Intensity and Amount - Controls how much the Ambient Occlusion or Indirect Lighting should impact the final image.
AOMixing - This settings is used to change the way the vanilla AO and ENB AO should be mixed (if you still have the vanilla AO enabled).
Works like a very rough and differently mixed ambient occlusion that only affects shadows (areas that are not lit by direct lighting).
Decrease the AmbientMinLevel to increase the effect.
[OBJECT]
SubSurfaceScattering - Has NOTHING to do with ENB SSS! This controls how much the vanilla SSS should impact skins (yeah, vanilla skyrim has SSS, its just pretty meh and produces the infamous bronze shine from time to time if you use vanilla textures). Only increase this effect if you use high res SSS textures!
Specular - Same as the one in [ENVIRONMENT] but only impacts something like characters.
SubSurfaceScattering - Controls the vanilla "SSS" effect (I don't know if this effect has even earned the name SSS....) of some plants. Don't increase it too much or you will have glowing sticks and leaves even in shadows.
Specular - Same as [ENVIRONMENT] but only impacts some plants.
[EYE]
SubSurfaceScattering - Same story as the [VEGETATION] version. This just makes eyes glow, so don't increase those values a lot, or everyone will have flashlights in their eyes!
Specular - Same as [ENVIRONMENT] but only for eye meshes.
Note: Some eye meshes from followers or NPC overhauls don't use the "eye envionmental map" and won't be recognized as eyes by the ENB and use the [OBJECT] parameters instead. If you see some "flashlight eyes" thats probably why.
[GRASS]
The modifiers here can be used to alter the way direct-/ambient lighting influences grass and the subsurface scattering parameters can be used to add SSS to your grass.
[WINDOWLIGHT]
Controls the illumnation of the windows themself.
[LIGHTSPRITE]
Impacts the look of the "halo" that surrounds fire and some spells.
[VOLUMETRICFOG]
Volumetric fog is primarily used for the distant mountain fog and the values here control the look of it.
[FIRE]
How fire should look like can be controlled here.
[PARTICLE]
Is used to control various particle effects like the smoke that rises up from fires and houses.
Imagesbased lighting uses the sky gradient to illuminate the environment or to create a reflection. If you have a blue sky the light from this effect will also be blue. If its a cloudy day the light well be less intense and will have more of the cloud color. You get the idea.
[RAIN]
ENB rain replaces the flat texture that gets used to create a rain effect with more realistic rain drops that reflect the environment around them. Some like the effect and some hate it. You can disable/enable the effect here or customize how the rain drops should look like. If you want them to have longer trails, increase the "MotionStretch" and if you want them to be more faded out, increase the "MotionTransparency".
[SUBSURFACESCATTERING]
I don't think I can describe the values you can tweak here good enough, but I'll still try.
Note: "Surface" can be exchanged for "skin" and "object" for "body" if you can understand it easier that way.
Radius - How far the light travels under the surface.
Amount - How much the light that traveled beneath the surface should illuminate it.
Epidermal and Subdermal - I think a google search can explain those things 10x times better than I.
DiffuseSaturation - How much color the light should carry. Higher values will result in darker and more saturated light (more red if we talk about skin).
Mix - How the Epidermal and Subdermal light should be mixed together to create the final SSS effect.
Translucency and Phase - How easy the light can penetrate an object.
[REFLECTION]
Those parameters control the vanilla screen space reflections. Their quality is pretty bad out of the box, so I would suggest to disable them for now.
[WATER]
The place for all effects that enhance Skyrims water. Parallax and Displacement + Tesselation need a special water texture (like RW2's optional ENB textures) to work properly. Those special textures have an alpha channel that is used to displace the water surface.
DisableDistantReflection - Disables some kind of extra reflection that gets enabled after a certain distance to the camera (doesn't mix particularly well with the water effect and should be disabled).
EnableTemporalAA - This AA method is used to reduce the effect of temporal aliasing on water surfaces. Meaning if wave vertecies are moving faster than lets say one pixel per frame they get blended smoothly together to avoid jagged edges that would result from such movement.
EnableDispersion - Simulates refraction of light with different wavelengths (similar to the optional dispersion effect of my rain droplet shader). Same effect that makes prisms work and causes chromatic aberration in real life lenses as well.
EnableCaustics - Caustics are basically just a bunch of refracted light rays. Imagine it as a magnifying glass but more random because it depends on the current water movement. You can see the effect at shore lines the best.
EnableParallax - Its an illusion thats used to create a fake displacement effect. Its a lot cheaper than actual displacement mapping and should look good enough for normal gameplay.
EnableSelfReflection - I'm not sure on this one, but my guess is that its a subtle self illumination of adjacent waves through light reflection.
EnableDisplacement - Now, this is the real deal when it comes to water displacement. It uses the alpha channel of your water texture to displace the mesh of the water surface to create real waves instead of just an illusion. Why is it disabled in Silent Horizons by default then? Because that effect costs a ton of resources to compute and doesn't bring enough visible improvements over parallax to justify those higher costs.
EnableTessellation - Tessellation is basically cutting the water surface mesh into much smaller triangles in real time which allows a much more detailed displacement effect. If you enable water displacement you automatically enable tessellation in SE, even if you didn't activate it in the GUI. This is because some water surfaces were too low poly to add the displacement effect alone.
DisplacementQuality and TessellationQuality - Quality parameters. Plain and simple.
FresnelMultiplier - Strength of the fresnel reflection on the water surface.
ReflectionAmount - How much the water surface should reflect the environment and sky.
DispersionAmount - Influences the amount of dispersion (depends on your water texture as well).
CausticsAmount - Sun light strength multiplied by this paramter results in the actual intensity of the caustics.
SunSpecularMultiplier - How bright the sun reflections should be.
SunScatteringMultiplier - Basically subsurface scattering of the sunlight in the water.
WavesAmplitude - Influences the wave amplitude. Another straight forwards paramter.
Muddiness - How clear the water should be.
[UNDERWATER]
Can be used to alter the amount of tint and caustics underwater.
[GAMEVOLUMETRICRAYS]
Controls the intensity and color of the volumetric lighting that is new to SSE.
[VOLUMETRICRAYS]
The parameters here affect the sky box and distant terrain limited rays. The only occluders that influence this effect are the different cloud layers.
[RAYS]
The sun rays of the ENB binaries. You can choose your desired quality, type and intensity right here.
[LENSFLARE_GAME]
Impacts the intensity of the anamorphic lens flares of the base game. You should have disabled those in the ini completely when installing the preset. They don't look good and can't be controlled enough to be usable. Furthermore they trigger on far to many objects now that ENBs use real HDR values.
And I've included my own version that can be tweaked through the enblens.
[PROCEDURALSUN]
Replaces the sun texture with a proceduraly generated one.
[CLOUDSHADOWS]
Cast shadows on the environment when clouds cover up the sun. The intensity of those shadows can be controlled here.
[COMPLEXPARTICLELIGHTS]
Spawns lights that illuminate the environment (including grass!) on things like candles or lanterns (all meshes that get controlled by the lightsprite category basically).
EnableBigRange - Increases the range of the new lights at the cost of some additional performance.
EnableShadow and ShadowQuality - Can be used to enable and control additional shadows from the new light sources. Be careful when using BigRange and Shadow at the same time. They can hit your performance pretty hard. (save and apply changes after enabling them to see the change)
Intensity and Curve - Impact the brightness and curve of the new lights.
Specular - Controls additional specular reflection that get triggered by the particle lights.
DistanceFade - Is used to influence how far the light is allowed to travel before fading.
[COMPLEXFIRELIGHTS]
Same story as complex particle lights, but this time they only spawn on magic effects like flame spells, the ice spell particles or electrical impacts.
The only new setting is HitIntensity and controls an additional illumination effect where the spell hits (an NPC for example).
This effect can impact your performance drasticaly if you use both BigRange and Shadows (it can cost more FPS than all other ENB effects combined!). But it only impacts your performance when a spell that utilizes this effect is on screen, otherwise it doesn't do anything.
[SKINSPECULAR]
Adds a fresnel reflection to skins. They get only created by the new complex lights. In Oldrim they also use other lighting, but in SSE only those new lights get used. This doesn't do anything to the normal specular effect! Its just an additional one.
[SHADOW]
Contains quailty parameter for distant and detailed shadows.
[SUNGLARE]
Allows limited control over the vanilla sun glare. These options aren't needed if you use Silent Horizons solar cleaner.
[WETSURFACES]
Adds fresnel reflections to the entire scene to simulate a wetness effect. The reflections come from either cheap screen space reflections or a global cubemap (if its enabled). You can control the environment and body parameters separately from one another.
[RAINWETSURFACES]
Works like the normal WETSURFACES effect but is only active when it detects rain. Use this if you want the wetness effect during rainy weathers without having to mess with the multi weather system. This will also override the normal effect when its active!
