Photon Shaders 1.21, 1.21.4, 1.21.3 → 1.20

After three years of development, the creator of Photon shaders has finally released his pack, which really modifies Minecraft’s graphics. Why did it take so long? Well, he kept rewriting the entire shader from scratch, each time changing the art style to get closer to perfection—pretty wild, right? But the wait was worth it, and now, regular updates keep making this shader pack even better.

Photon shaders nearly perfectly mimic real life, especially during sunrise and sunset. The versatility of this pack is amazing, and we’ve seen players use it in all kinds of creative ways. For instance, building epic Minecraft spaceships paired with the futuristic Space texture pack. Even modern cities take on a whole new life with Photon, giving off a striking cyberpunk atmosphere that will blow you away. For modders, the compatibility with the Distant Horizons mod is a major highlight. This mod adds vast landscapes to Minecraft, and Photon makes these endless vistas feel extremely realistic.

Randomized Weather Skies

One of the standout features of Photon shaders is the fully revamped sky, lighting, and water engine. The panoramas are cohesive and beautiful, and if you’re a fan of stargazing, you’ll love the Milky Way at night. During one of our in-game tests, we were blown away by the randomized weather skies that change every day. The volumetric clouds look good, though there’s one thing to note: from above, the clouds can look a bit noisy. However, the Photon shader pack offers a “blocky clouds” option that uses Minecraft’s default cloud map, similar to what you’d see with Nostalgia or Complementary shaders.

Colored Lighting System in Photon Shaders

One of the most exciting features of Photon is the colored lighting system. Using a voxel flood-fill algorithm (only available in the Ultra profile with the Iris mod), this shader changes the lighting based on the Minecraft environment. We tested it by building a futuristic neighborhood with blue blocks, and the entire area glowed with a cool blue tint at night. For a funny moment, we even tried using green frog lights underwater with Faithful, and it turned our exploration into something surprisingly soothing and fun to look at.

Ultimate Control and Performance

If you’re someone who likes to modify settings to get the perfect balance of performance and results, Photon shaders has an expansive settings menu that lets you control every aspect of the mod. During our tests, we played around with the soft shadows and were impressed with how realistic they looked—especially with the variable penumbra size. On low-end devices? No problem! Photon even has advanced temporal upscaling (disabled by default) to boost FPS in Minecraft while maintaining image quality. So it works well with older hardware.

If you’re wondering how to make the night less dark in Photon shaders, there’s a simple solution. All you need to do is disable the Purkinje Shift in the Color Grading settings. This feature mimics the effect our eyes have in real life, where darker scenes become desaturated, and reds turn darker. Turning it off will make your Minecraft nights feel much brighter and easier to navigate.

Amazing Support by the Photon Shaders Community

While the creator of Photon Shaders, sixthsurge, developed most of the pack on his own, he did get some help from talented members of the community. For example, Emin, a skilled developer, contributed to fixing shadow issues by implementing the Shadow Bias Method from Complementary Reimagined. This tweak fully eliminates annoying bugs like “peter-panning” (where shadows look like they’re floating) and light leaking through underground structures. Another big contribution came from DrDesten, who worked on Depth Tolerance Calculation for SSR. This feature helps prevent “false reflections”, which can make surfaces look weird in Minecraft, like reflecting blocks that aren’t even there.

A huge shoutout goes to everyone who helped fix bugs and polish the pack. If you run into any bugs yourself, don’t worry! The best place to get help is the official Photon Shaders Discord server. The community there is filled with experts, including developers like Xonk, who created Bliss. So, if you need help or just want to chat with shader pros, that’s the place to go.

Our Opinion After Testing Photon Shaders

After installing Photon shaders and giving them a solid test run, we can confidently say this shader pack rivals—if not surpasses—popular shaders like BSL. We’re big fans of realistic skies and water in Minecraft, and Photon nails both. The sunsets, reflections, and water textures are jaw-dropping. That said, we could practically hear our CPU heating up as we cranked up the settings—so keep that in mind if you’re running the best settings.

For us, this shader pack quickly became a new favorite, especially when paired with the Optimum Realism texture pack and Better Leaves. These combinations make your world feel alive, with lush trees and realistic textures. However, we were hoping for an opacity option to adjust how clearly you can see underwater and a slider to control the fog density when swimming below the surface.

XRay

Faithful 32x

FullBright

Jenny Mod

Video & Screenshots

Comparison

How To Install Photon Shaders

Photon Shaders Download

Iteration Shaders

FastPBR Shaders

Miniature Shaders

Spooklementary Shaders