A question about shaders - Pixel-by-pixel inter-blending

[Dr. Shenanigans]

I for the love of me cannot seem to find anything similar to this, it's a far-shot asking on steam, but I figured, "why not"?

My Dream Shader

I've played a lot of the classics, NES, SNES, Genesis, TurbografX, etc. And one thing I've seen that I like to recreate in a shader, is how due to the technology in a CRT works, is that the pixels "bleed" into each other.

The goal behind this, is to make it so that pixel art in a game is blended and mixed with the other pixels around it, in a way that makes the pixels softer and the colors blend into each other.

What I am NOT looking for

what i am not looking for is CRT-imitation shaders or flat vector-upscalers. I see too many of these, and though the nostalgia of the scanlines, the boxes, most of these shaders just trying to imitate the overall 'look' of a CRT, whereas I'm looking to basically use a key part of it that was cool.

Most of the upscalers make things look like they were made in a vector-drawing program

My problem with looking for my dream shader- the plague that is "The Algorithm".

I try to search up pixel-blending, all I get is pixel art. I know pixel art, I can do pixel art, I love pixel art but it's not suitable for me. I try to search up anything blending-related, and unfortunately, it's all about stuff that's similar to photoshop. GIMP and Krita, stuff I already know.

too much of "I think you want this," crap.

TL;DR

I'm looking to either find or create a shader that takes nearby pixels, blends them with the colors of nearby pixels and softens them. Every time I try to search something like this, I either get pixel art tutorials, CRT-imitation shaders, or pixel-art upscaling shaders that makes everything look flat.

[jagholin]

There are a lot of effects that blend pixels together, they usually go under umbrella term "convolution image filters", some examples you can find on wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(image_processing) . I guess the question is for whatever effect you want to do, can you write its convolution matrix? Or you do you want to do something nontrivial?

[Dr. Shenanigans]

Originally posted by jagholin:

There are a lot of effects that blend pixels together, they usually go under umbrella term "convolution image filters", some examples you can find on wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(image_processing) . I guess the question is for whatever effect you want to do, can you write its convolution matrix? Or you do you want to do something nontrivial?

But I must confess first - I am just a beginner with shaders. Only just did the tutorial. Thank you for bringing up convolutions though, I think that could be relevant to what I need when I get to a higher level.