I'm trying ReShade out for the first time, although I'm a bit sceptical about my game being able to handle it. Anyway, no harm in testing it.

However, I haven't found a preset that I like, yet. Any recommendations? I'm looking for something that is natural and realistic (more dimmed down and down to earth kind of lighting / colour palette; maybe like greyish?), and has the blur effect. So far all the presets I've come across have been too bright and colourful.

I take tips for other lighting effects, too (especially with added possibility of aurora appearing in the winter sky).

Thanks in advance!

I've done quite a bit of monkeying around with ReShade at this point -- most of the presets I see are not an improvement IMHO. I've ended up pulling most of my experimental effects out, leaving just sharpening and an increase in ambient light. I personally don't want to decrease the saturation, but that's obviously a matter of taste. I also don't want to INCREASE the saturation; I've seen plenty of that too, plus increasing the lighting to the point that things look washed out. I'd love to get some better ambient occlusion, but the stuff I've tried so far has ended up with too much shadow.

One thing I've found is that when I download someone else's preset and try it out, it almost never looks like their screenshots. I'm guessing that there's a lot of variation in monitors and graphics cards.

I'm curious if anyone else has suggestions.

I tried GShade recently (a fork of ReShade) and couldn't stand that it isn't UI aware. I guess it's just for screenshots and not for gameplay, but the two being identical is a point of pride for me, I guess.

If you have a NVIDIA card, the ingame overlay has filter options. I find these are more subtle to tweak on the fly especially for sharpness/saturation, and if I remember correctly the in-game screenshot can see the changes rather than having to capture the screen by other means.
All filters, of course, will inherit from the games own lighting and graphics settings.
Quite a few lighting mods have aurora options, but you can always add them yourself if your preference doesn't have them.

My personal go-to is having Gelina's Lighting Tweaks (direct link because her blog is gone) in Overrides and Saint Greer lighting in Packages. LD's Shader Tweaks are also hard to go back from- the glass shader is my favourite part and it isn't even listed as a feature :')

Yeah, I dislike that Re/GShade isn't UI-aware and that so many effects screw up the menus. I read some forum posts on how to order effects to minimalize the text distortion, and I have my stuff set up in a way I can live with.

I don't have an NVIDIA card. I've heard plenty about how much you can customize, and I can't do any of it.

What's in Gelina's Lighting Tweaks? I never tried LD's Shader Tweaks because it required setup I wasn't totally comfortable with, but it's been a long time, and folks are happy with it, so I'll take a look at that again.

I don't generally like installing a specific lighting mod for all my worlds because I like them having different lighting.

ETA: I think Gelina's Lighting Tweaks might be the lovely ambient occlusion I've seen on some screenshots that I never was able to get ReShade to do!

I don't know what makes Gelina's lighting tweaks so special (all it has is the lighting + sky ini, which is why I put it in Overrides because all lighting mods include these plus the weathers), but I can't part with it! I'm especially fond of how it makes sims skin look outside, like there's subtle subsurface scattering.

I also force ambient occlusion with Nvidia Inspector- so another graphics card gated thing- but I vaguely remember there being a Radeon equivalent. It's a much harder topic to link references to because a lot of what I learned about it was from Nitromon- who erased their MTS post history when they left

LD's Shader Tweaks (the Shadow Extender too) are definitely the intimidating kind of plugin, but if you keep the original archive you can use it as reference of what to delete if you ever change your mind.

Here are some examples of my ingame lighting and graphics + rare inclusion of my own sims.

I found Astro's 2022 YouTube tutorial on ReShade to be really helpful. He uses just a handful of settings (mxao, debanding, sharpen, vibrance and clarity) that enhance the look of the game without sacrificing gameplay performance. I've been using these settings in-game for about a year and have been really happy with the appearance. Around the 23 minute timestamp, he shows before/after in his live gameplay in Bridgeport so you can see the effects. It gives extra realism without making the menus unreadable. Maybe you could adjust the Vibrance setting in the opposite direction to get a more muted look?

Astro also followed up this video with one on LazyDuchess' Shadow Extender where he walks through his settings and the tweaks that he tried out in GraphicsRules which were most successful. Both of these have had the most worthwhile impact on my own gameplay, and I thought it might be relevant to your discussion.