I will give you a little background on my monitor and show you my settings… First I am having issues understanding the settings and how to achieve full HDR. The game I am playing is tale of vesperia and while it looks better I dont think my settings are right… to give you detail into my monitor its the pg27uq which can reach a peak brightness of 1000 nits … I have included a photo of my setttings
Don’t use DCI-P3 or Rec 2020 for input or output. Those are only there for debugging stuff, the game’s content is mastered for Rec 709 / CIE XYZ.
That is a rather old version of Special K, BTW.
Grab 0.11.0.45,
- Use CIE XYZ for input / output
- Don’t enable full luminance (that will clip details)
- Set the peak white slider to max (without FULL range)
- Use the “Horz % HDR Processing” slider to do a side-by-side comparison
4.1 Adjust gamma until they kind of balance out (Windows HDR has a similar procedure, so it should be familiar)
4.2 You may want to use HDR Visualization and continue adjusting gamma until you get UI components to show up grayscale
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Thank you so much, I appreciate you taking the time to reply to me.
Might I ask why you wouldn’t use full luminance? You say that it would clip details, yet in my testing, it usually doesn’t, and by not using full luminance, nothing actually reaches my monitor’s max brightness. This is not great, as I would prefer bright highlights to use the maximum peak brightness.
Also, this is a bit unrelated, but is there a chance the Special K will eventually do some color space transformation to take advantage of wide color?
Is your monitor calibrated properly? And what’s the peak brightness of your monitor?
I don’t have a “true” HDR panel, but it’s calibrated and just maxing out the luminance in the HDR widget (with the full luminance option disabled) always works perfectly for me.
It’s calibrated, peak brightness is 600 nits. Highlights only actually reach that 600 nits if I check the option to use full luminance and max the slider out (or at least close to max to prevent the little amount of clipping that occurs at max).
Because the rated peak luminance returned by EDID is for a 10% window. If you expand the range of peak white to match, any time more than 10% of your screen is full-bright, you are going to lose detail.
TVs may be able to recover from this problem using dynamic tonemapping, but monitors cannot.
I see what you mean, I have noticed that as I increase the peak brightness slider, everything gets brighter. It would actually be really great if I could edit the luminance curve, so that midtones stay in their proper nit value while highlights are at peak brightness.