I had someone on another forum comment that my video made it seem like it was less clearer to see (the racing) than without the mod, so in case anyone here has the same thoughts he's my answer...
... Presuming you're referring to it being darker when in shadows, that matter can be a little complicated. I'm not going defensive here, but as some feedback...
1) Firstly, general advice is to always check that your display is accurately calibrated and doesn't contain any "enhancing modes" such as anything that changes contrast. To ballpark the display you need some test patterns and can be setup by eye in a dark room. If say the lower end of someone's brightness / dynamic contrast / black levels are not calibrated properly then dark greys can become black (called black crush) or just darker than they should be. As my Reshade has darker areas in sunlight / sunrise shadows then your display needs to be spot on with accuracy otherwise any visual change could be a step too far and negatively effect visuals / practicality. On all my displays (1 newish OLED & 2 Sony LED) the "darkness" looks ok and is definitely raceable.
2) While in one regard the original / "reshade off" is obviously correct as that's simply how the devs made it and more importantly that's how it looks when using a graphics engine that's only linear-based (side-stepping gamma correction curves) one could argue that their shadows are too bright but had to be done that way as a linear-based setup doesn't contain enough visual information / range to pull off darker lighting while preserving brighter detail within low lighting (in other words, it's averaged out for balancing sakes). That's the whole point of tone-mapping, to get a much wider range of luminosity which is what my Reshade does. Admittedly when tone-mapping is applied to a "linear space" then internal lighting compensations are normally required, but this can only be done internally by the game's devs. All I can do is what this Reshade preset already does, in that I manually made some custom curves to ensure there was no black crush and that shadowy areas weren't too dark. Of course when it comes to what is and isn't too dark that all kinda starts to become subjective apart from when dealing with HDRi lighting, but that's well outside of Racerooms native scope / capability.
3) The visual differences between modded vs original look more extreme when shown in the blunt on/off way that my video does - when you just have my Reshade on it doesn't stand out anywhere near as much and (to me) looks more natural. As a perfect example of how my settings aren't very dark in comparison, the video's shadows at Laguna Seca on the home straight with original lighting have a luminosity / brightness of 26%, while my lighting in the same place is 21% (obviously not that different). IIRC from some HDRi analysis I've done, a sunny day's shadows IRL span a from around 55% upper limit to 15% lower - so for non-HDRi lighting set at sunrise / sunset then my shadow levels are definitely in the ball-park, even
if very marginally lower (5% at most). I presented the video the way I did just for ease, time-saving, and I thought it just made it very clear what the difference was between modded vs original, but in hindsight I can see how that can backfire compared to just showing it as is and letting people see / try it for themselves.
3) The darker shadows stand out the most only in sunrise & sunsets settings - the morning, afternoon, and midday settings don't have particularly dark shadows at all. Again, I can't change their internal lighting engine for the extreme times of day so one Reshade preset likely won't be 100% perfect, but as said this preset already has compensation tweaks so no loss of detail happens. Before I made those adjustments you couldn't see most of the inside of the Indycar cockpit, which is now (just about) fully visible even with a tone-mapper that naturally destroys darker content. Last night I did a 3 lap race that was the last Raceroom race in the video (1992 DTM, Nordschleife in Afternoon) and it look pretty perfect to me.
4) Although I really like the look of having what I call more impactful lighting, I acknowledge that some people might find this (slightly) less practical. I ideally wanted to have the darker areas have even more detail and light in them than it currently has, but that would put me square in the territory of fix something by breaking something else. I could possibly make alternative presets that are easily switchable that could be more tailored to different times of day, but I thought this would inconvenience people too much, maybe completely break the general tone-mapping, plus I like the concept of making just one preset that does the technically & visually correct adjustments and compensations all in one configuration. Now that I have v1.0 released (which will remain to be the main version of this mod) I will look into how much I can brighten up some of the darker times without breaking the rest of the day.
So long story not short - if / when I can make it lighter / clearer to see without breaking the tone-mapping as a whole then I'll update the mod to a new revision (both versions would be included) but these might be pretty big "ifs" and "whens"!!