Yes, things have been changed. I introduced Paper White and set it to ~25% of what it used to be at. This expands range significantly and reduces saturation on all but the brightest parts of the scene.
If you want the old behavior back (keep in mind, it oversaturates things by a fair margin), jack the Paper White slider up past 50%.
[ Old behavior was equivalent to Paper White = 100% ]
Even after changing the paper white, the overall image still looks radically different. On the previous version I had to use some really bizarre values of gamma, middle grey and preak brightness to minimize black crush in The Division, and in the end I kept finding new areas with crush as well as blown out highlights.
Now there’s no such issues whatsoever even on the default settings, regardless of paper white, I dunno if it was just some weird issue specific to this game.
It’s certainly better not having to deal with black crush, but no matter what settings I use I can never attain the previous “pop” with HDR.
Just found it interesting.
Yeah, some of that pop was the image being manipulated too far to the point where you were losing detail. Unfortunately, when things work correctly, you shouldn’t be getting that much contrast.
That’s why this stuff is dangerous, it’s very easy to produce an image that looks unbelievable until put under a microscope and then you’re conflicted whether to try and reproduce the knowingly bad image for its visual presentation or do things the right way.
There’s still a lot of room for improvement here, though. I will be working on eye adaptation to dynamically expand / contract the dynamic range for indoor / outdoor scenes. I expect that will bring some of the “pop” back without loss of detail.
I have recently had some issues with Ziggurat 2 where I am unable to get rid of the black crush at all on ACES where it’s good at the passthrough option. It is a Unity game and I have tried all the settings without luck. I am using the latest dev-version of SpecialK that was posted around 13 hours ago.
If it’s Unity, it probably uses sRGB gamma. They need special treatment.
Try setting the gamma slider to ~0.45
To that end, ignore my previous post =P
+ Added HDR Widget option to control "Implicit sRGB" gamma processing,
this is needed for many Unity engine games that would otherwise be
too dark to do any kind of processing on.
^^^ (Typo optional)
This setting is needed for “The Witness,” “Watch_Dogs 2,” and I’m sure many Unity games (though cannot name any off the top of my head).
Yeah that completely fixed it for Ziggurat 2!
Yes, but only if the game is native HDR to begin with.
That mode is for analyzing HDR in games with official HDR. If you turn it on in an SDR game, LSD probably produces more accurate images.
Ahhhh okay I understand, it’s looking like to me aces filmic is the best looking over passthrough it’s great!!
Oh also one last question Kal, my tv comes up as supported 8-bit with dithering, which Ive read up is pretty much equivalent to 10-bit, would this affect how special K hdr looks in games?
Well if you read up what dithering actually is then you know 
Long technical story short: to your eyes it will look very close to real 10bit. but uses 8bit (16.5million color options) and then “alternates the pixels” with another color to simulate the color it is supposed to be. 10bit it uses the “real” color (it has 1.02billion color options)
Any idea what could be causing game to freeze on last displayed frame after alt-tabbing? Happening to me in The Division 1, also occurs if I change resolutions/window modes. For some reason the game also always insist on using frame buffer resolution that is a few pixels below native. Thanks.
EDIT: This is so strange, I wiped the SK config and started anew, on the first game bootup with HDR enabled, I don’t have the alt tab issue. After relaunching the game, the issue comes up again and won’t go away, despite not changing any settings.
The in game mouse input also breaks along with the tabbing, the game’s cursor is visible at all times and stops when hitting the edges of the window.
Still looking for some advice, especially regarding the recommended settings for LG OLEDs.
P.S.: Also, not sure if the “remaster” options should be left unchecked or not (10- and 11-bit were selected by default on previous versions of SK - now, they’re all disabled by default).
The framerate limiter resets itself when you alt-tab now, perhaps you have some third-party software (most likely something that draws an overlay) that’s deadlocking things?
Enable the background rendering mode to prevent any such software from causing problems.
I have no recommendations, if I did then there would be no calibration screen This requires tuning on a per-game basis, some of them exceed SDR range more than others do and that’s why the maximum luminance slider and all that other jazz exists.
As for remastering, I’ve turned them all off for compatibility reasons. You’re encouraged to try turning them on for better HDR image quality, but they may cause visual anomalies if not outright crashing. As such, the best policy to have is off-by-default.
But should I enable full HDR luminance and max out the peak white slider? What about all the pink in the image while using ACES (check the screenshots I posted earlier)?
Only screenshot I saw had no pink pixels in it.
You can enable the full range as long as 1) the average luminance is not all pink and 2) the local luminance has no pink.
Since there seems to be some confusion over what constitutes pink, I suppose I’ll color-cycle the out-of-range pixels as shown in this video:
+ Changed HDR Display Name Query to use NvAPI on compatible systems to
correctly map DXGI Display Handles to EDID Display Names
SpecialK64.7z (7.5 MB)
SpecialK32.7z (6.3 MB)
I need help validating this works as intended. I have multiple monitors at my disposal, but they are all LG OLED TVs (ringing endorsement for LG if ever there were one), lol. On my system, even if the wrong monitor is matched up, the name will be correct.
I uploaded my screenshots to this website, got the color code (HTML/HEX code: #ff00ff; RGB code: 255, 0, 255) and typed that into this other website, which gave me the name of the color to which I was referring before: magenta.
All these screenshots are filled with it:
