PostFX: why every guide gives you different numbers

Look up postFX settings and you will find Brightness 80 in
one guide and a recommended ceiling of 50 in the next. Neither is wrong. PostFX
is not correcting the game — it is correcting your monitor, its calibration, and
how much light is in your room. Numbers copied from someone else's screenshot
are numbers tuned for someone else's screen.

So here is a starting point and, more usefully, the method.

A reasonable place to begin:

• Brightness: 40–55
• Saturation: 10–25
• Clarity: 30–50
• Colorfulness: 30–60
• Luma sharpen: 30–50
• Adaptive sharpen: 25–45

Night raids, start lower and lift slowly:

• Brightness 20–35, Saturation 10–25, Clarity 20–35, Luma sharpen 30–50,

Adaptive sharpen 25–45.

The method, which does transfer:

1. Tune in the place that matters. Load the map you struggle on, at the time of

day you struggle with, and stand where you normally get killed from. The
hideout is a bad reference — it is evenly lit and nothing in it is trying to
hide from you.

1. Change one slider at a time and go back to the same spot. PostFX sliders

interact, and moving three at once tells you nothing about which one helped.

1. Push each one until it looks wrong, then come back. You are looking for the

edge of the useful range, not a number someone posted.

1. Stop when the image gets noisy. Past a point, clarity and sharpening add

texture to foliage that reads exactly like a prone player. More contrast is
not more information — you can absolutely tune yourself into seeing worse.

What to be suspicious of: any setup built to crush shadows and flatten the image
into high contrast. It makes dark corners readable and makes a stationary player
against a busy treeline almost invisible, because you have thrown away the tonal
range that separated them. Tarkov hides people in texture, not only in darkness.