Common Mistakes

In-Game Monitor Settings

Many games, particularly from the early-to-mid 2000's, can use different tone mapping and gamma correction depending on whether your monitor is a CRT or LCD. Some of them, such as Half Life 2, try to automatically choose the correct config.

If you're playing such a game, you will need to make sure it's configured for a CRT. Otherwise shadows will be way too dark, and highlights will be way too bright. Typically this will take the form of a config value that says your monitor is a TV. There might also be settings for limiting the dynamic range.

Dynamic range is often clamped using a 0-255 scale. For crt-royale-reshade on a modern monitor, you'll likely want to leave the white point (the max) at 255 and set the black point (the min) to 16'ish. This will leave highlights alone, but will prevent shadows from becoming pitch-black. If highlights are pure white, you can reduce the white point to something like 239'ish.

If your game has this kind of issue, but its configs aren't able to fix it, you can use Marty's Lightroom shader. Simply set the Black Level to something like -16. Alternatively, if you're feeling fancy you can play with the various global curves and get an even better result.

HDR

You should use HDR if possible.

You don't have to, so technically this isn't a mistake. But it'll look a lot better if you do. It'll let your LCD monitor get closer to the peak brightness that CRTs were capable of.