Cinematic Minecraft Shader built off Photon and is for Iris. Dynamic atmosphere, volumetric clouds, PBR water & reflections — built for gameplay and Apple Silicon.
A Ice Spikes Biome
A Swamp
A village
Another Village
Shrublands
Lava
Cherry Grove
(WIP) Luster is a cinematic, gameplay-focused shader pack for Minecraft: Java Edition, heavily reworked from the Photon codebase by SixthSurge. It is built around modular rendering systems — dynamic Rayleigh/Mie/Ozone/Mist atmosphere, layered volumetric clouds, configurable lighting and reflections, SSPT Colored Lighting and Sun/moon Bounce, Directional Ambient Lighting, PBR materials and water, physically based Camera Pipeline, and a full post-processing pipeline.
Luster is designed to be highly configurable through Iris' in-game Shader Options, with quality and performance controlled through profiles rather than hard feature limits.
A dedicated Mac Compatible profile is included for Apple Silicon systems using Iris' OpenGL 4.1 compatibility path, while retaining the core atmosphere, lighting, clouds, water, reflections, shadows, and post-processing features where practical.
Luster ships with five profiles. The profiles only change default settings and quality levels — every available option can still be customized in Shader Options.
Low — reduced sampling and effects for lower-end hardware. Medium — balanced image quality and performance. High — higher-quality shadows, reflections, clouds, ambient occlusion, and lighting. Ultra — maximum quality and sampling, including the highest available cloud, shadow, AO, reflection, and material settings. Mac Compatible — a conservative configuration tuned for macOS and Apple Silicon.
Profiles are starting points, not limits. You can mix settings freely, such as using higher-quality clouds on Medium or lowering expensive effects on Ultra.
Shader Loader: Iris only. OptiFine is not supported.
GPU: Nvidia · AMD · Intel · Apple Silicon
Apple Silicon systems use Iris' OpenGL compatibility path. Some rendering features are hardware- or platform-dependent. If you have trouble in earlier version e.g 1.21.11 thats because of Macbook sampler limits just turn off cloud shadows or SSR and it will work again. I suggest you use the latest versions because iris has more samplers availble for these later versions e.g 26.2 allowing you to have more features at once.
Mod Support: Distant Horizons · Voxy
.zip from the release page..zip directly in .minecraft/shaderpacks — do not unzip it.Luster is built on substantially reworked code from Photon by SixthSurge. Original Photon credits and applicable licenses are retained in the project.
See the included LICENSE files for full attribution and licensing terms.