HDR on Win looks wrong! Here's the solution for SDR content inside HDR on Win11. All Displays fixed!

Thanks to Dylanraga for creating these ICC profiles! He tested them on an LG C2

[datachu]

Not just providing a fix, but an excellent explanation too! I've had this washed out SDR problem with multiple HDR displays (external and internal) ever since Windows 10... But this totally FIXES it!

[TimothyMakin]

Dude you just saved me I have an odyssey G9 the Qled model and this totaly just fixed my HDR. Can I.... can I give you a hug. Man I am so happy my $1500 monitor can actually do what it is suppose to do now.

[MsMarco]

This is awesome, finally a fix for the gamma issue.
I'm honestly shocked that after all this time Microsoft still hasn't fixed it. It's such an obvious problem, just goes to show that dev's don't use HDR themselves but we already knew that.
The only issue with this fix is the peak brightness, if that was adjustable this would be near perfect.

[XxGiOxX]

Love these videos man, they have taught me so much regarding HDR and setting it up correctly in reshade. speaking of, could you PLEASE create a video on lilium settings and how to adjust the peak brightness and settings etc and understanding/using the HDR analysis tool and what to look for on the graphs. that would be your best video yet!

[bosaim]

I VOIDED my own warranty day 1 because of your videos and i could never be happier.
Now i am using every possible nit that i have paid for.

[MuzdokOfficial]

You have learned so much in 2 years bro. Keep the great work 💪😎

[mithrandir_]

Wow this is honestly a big difference, for the color profile i used before the Windows HDR Calibration App but by applying this color profile it look overall much better! Im honestly impressed, it seems the Windows Auto HDR have a much stronger impact than before. :D

[KungKalle]

Thank you for all videos! Damn, now my Oled C1 looks nice!

[Morden]

Goodness even on the youtube window the difference is immediately apparent. Thanks

[bwellington]

Tried this for War Thunder since you cant inject reshade into multiplayer games safely. (it does have native HDR, but it's bad)
Has clear advantage over standart SDR\HDR trick - no need to touch black levels on TV, but overall similar looks. Cant wait to see your considerations for AutoHDR games :)

[KingTodd]

whats the difference than to just use Colorcontrol v10.0.1.0 on my C3 and force changing the gamma to 2.4(high 1) from 2.2(medium)?
(i use 2.4 on SDR since i am in a dark room and have an eye light sensitivity).

i notice everything instantly looks the same when i do this.
and when i try the .icc profiles or make my own, it typically looks the same to me as if i did forced it to 2.4.
(if i make a profile on that site, and set it to 2.4, the colors are too contrasty, so i leave that at 2.2 for these tests)

[sheeftz]

HDR is so confusing. Nobody knows how it works. Nobody! Microsoft fucked everything up. TV manufacturers fucked everything up. There's no video, no paper explaning how HDR works and why literally everyone everytime messs things up when dealing with HDR. There's slider "SDR content brightness". People claim it increases your SDR birghness, even this video says exactly the same, but on my computer it does exactly the opposite. Yes, when I drag the slider to the right it makes the picture dimmer, and when I drag it to the left side it makes the picture brighter. How is this even possible?

The "Windows HDR calibration" tool is ridiculously broken. It's result depends on the "SDR content brightness" slider. Every second person claims that turning HDR on in Windows washes colors out, and every other second person suggests to "reinstall nVidia driver" to fix the problem...
Why the hell HDR is so fukin broken and nobody's even trying to fix it? Imagine an orinary folk turned HDR on his computer ON and it fucked his eyes so hard, he would never turn that shit on again, and will ignore the very existance of the HDR thing till the end of his days. Why do you need a degree in hardware engineering, a degree in photon physics and degree in software engineering to use the freaking HDR?

A dude from youtube with 8.5K subs fixing things after a multi-billions dollar corporation that should've been fixed on day 0. How this can be reality? How?
HDR is the most cursed tech abbreviation ever.

[mariokotlar]

At 5:30 you mention that most of the content we have is gamma 2.2 as opposed to sRGB. That is unfortunately not the case. The reason sRGB is the default, is that most PC content is indeed made to be viewed as sRGB. I'm a game developer that deals with HDR and a graphics professional in general. Anyone working professionally with PC graphics will end up getting one of the expensive very accurate displays aimed at professionals, and they accurately display sRGB, not gamma 2.2. However, those that work with TV industry, will work with 2.2 gamma, and they will use 2.2 or 2.4 gamma TVs as their reference displays.

And then we come to the murky overlap area, where services like youtube are used on both PCs and TVs, and both sRGB and 2.2 gamma content gets uploaded to them, so the whole thing is a mess, half of the youtube videos are sRGB, half are gamma 2.2, and many are even gamma 2.4. And when it comes to games, unless the game has in it's settings the option to change between gamma 2.2 and sRGB, then the game could be assuming either of those, because games are shipped to both consoles and PCs, and smaller developers tend to be unaware of these distinctions and might not be using accurate displays themselves. And when it comes to off the shelf gaming monitors, situation is murky again, with some adhering to sRGB standard, some being gamma 2.2, and some being somewhere in between. One of the best things about HDR is that it is a new unified gamma standard for both TVs and PCs, no more ambiguity.

Additional reason why HDR on windows often looks wrong is that LCD monitors have bad local dimming implementations, that simply end up with raised blacks. They're just inaccurate in HDR period. But it's when you know what something is supposed to look, that's when you can notice it. OLEDs don't have this problem. If HDR on Windows looks "wrong", that's purely due to viewer being used to gamma 2.2 and seeing the intended image for the first time ever. I use OLED TV as my primary PC monitor, and have used it for months with gamma 2.2, and for many more months with sRGB gamma, so I also speak from experience, not just theoretically. If you bought a monitor for professional artists such as ASUS ProArt Display OLED PA32DC, you would find that it in SDR looks exactly like the windows being in HDR on an OLED TV. It's actually the OLED TV SDR that's "inaccurate" in the context of a PC monitor. Yeah, sRGB should never have been invented...

One other thing worth mentioning is that windows apps in HDR will assume sRGB and gamma 2.2 icc profile, which will lead to double gamma conversion being applied in some cases. For example, if you watch an untagged or gamma 2.2 SDR tagged video, with mpv player in HDR windows, mpv will automatically convert 2.2 or whichever gamma video is in, to sRGB, making it look the same as if you viewed it in VLC with this icc profile for example. But if you have the 2.2 icc profile, double gamma transform will end up crushing your blacks significantly. So this icc profile can only be recommended as a makeshift way to mitigate the bad EOTF tracking caused by bad handling of local dimming. This is assuming that the .icc in Windows 11 applies to everything, not only what was originally SDR, please correct me if I'm wrong on that, I have yet to upgrade to Win 11.

[InnerHacking]

This worked for my Windows 11 in a monitor with fake HDR (Asus VG27AQA1A) I can now play Cyberpunk 2077 and work in Windows 11 both with HDR turned on and not strain my eyes. Cyberpunk 2077 with HDR looks next gen graphics with some good mods and HDR reshade. Thank you!

[PIDOFREAK]

Testing on an Alienware AW3423DWF QD-OLED Monitor: - The ICC profile will have an effect on everything tho, also on HDR content. I just did a small test and it also fixes Cyberpunk not having perfect blacks, no reshade, nothing. On Tone Mapping ingame HDR on 1.0 - have to do some further testing with Reshade analyzer tho, because it may be crushing as well - but at first it looked good. SDR Content (just like this video) looks better than with the ICC profile Alienware provided and better than the HDR Calibrated Profile from the Windows App (which looked worse than the AW Profile)

[maratxtv]

You really need to get SpecialK.

You'd be able to get HDR in pretty much every game without anti-cheat (even some EAC bypasses in Elden Ring and AC6) by just pressing launch in the SK launcher and enabling hdr!

[xhenriquefps]

There's no f way this worked. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[kamenbodzhakov]

Great video. So, since this is for ''SDR content inside of HDR'', is this a replacement for the auto HDR method, just without the ''auto''? If so, how is this method better than the auto HDR fix method you showed us in another video? The only difference it seems to be the unspecified profile downloaded there. Please clarify this. Thank you.

[TheLiddokun]

you said you wish you had one for 100 setting on the slider, its easy to make your own, just follow the guide custom LUT procedure, or even better use the autohotkey script some guy made (make sure to use standard HDR color profile not the one on the website tho)

[tomasbohunek]

This didn't make any big difference for me. What did I do wrong?