Hi,
I’ve got no issues with HDR Retrofit, it works amazing, better than RTX HDR and Auto HDR. But I don’t know why there is no paper white setting on the “HDR Configuration” window.
There is a “SDR White” slider on the main window’s HDR drop menu (not the “HDR Configuration” window), but I think that it only controls the Windows 11 SDR brightness slider (it’s really neat, it allows to specify a exact value in nits).
Why there is no paper white setting for the HDR calibration?
Thanks!
sk used to have a “paper white” setting, but it was removed in 2023.
while peak white would be peak white, sk’s “paper white” was basically just a boost or adjustment to midtones and you’d begin to lose detail in UI level screen elements if you set paper white too high or too low. it was recommended to set it to 1/2 to 2/3 of peak white.
it was generally suggested to aim for balanced paper white / max luminance for saturation. setting paper white to 80 would remove saturation… and you could reduce paper white lower than 80 manually in order to reduce peak brightness
but apparently some people found the “paper white” setting confusing and it was kind of redundant…
the middle gray slider can basically service the same purpose “paper white” in sk’s hdr calibration widget used to… plus there’s a saturation slider and a gamut expansion slider… you could play with those and others if you want.
in short, sk used to have a “paper white” setting but it was remove because it was basically just a setting for lowering the saturation a bit… and it’s not needed because there are other settings for that.
So, the default settings should be correct? My monitor is “VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400” certified, so the only setting that should be changed is “Brightness Scale“ to “400 cd/m2“ right?
i believe the default with sk is generally correct/fine.
that said, i generally recommend profiling display capabilities with sk and/or picking between preset 0 or 1; those two are conservatively set for lg oled tvs. the difference between preset 0 and preset 1 is that preset 1 has a slightly higher black level, which may give more shadow detail, but a lot of people want darker black and so preset 0 is the default…
after picking the preset, you could adjust the brightness slider and gamma expansion slider if you want. i believe that’s often enough for people. though you can still manually tweak other sliders if you want (and in some cases you may need to change sk’s EOTF option; some games may look extremely dark unless the EOFT option is changed)
beyond that, you could also try sk’s hdr pipeline remastering options. those options can result in seeing more details and/or result in color banding reduction (hdr isn’t just about a brighter image or just brighter highlights…)
but at least some remaster options may cause problems with some games, so you kinda have to try those and see. someone may have also tested them with the game you’re trying to play with sk, so you can check the remaster database in the sk wiki too.
for reference:
https://wiki.special-k.info/en/HDR/Retrofit
https://wiki.special-k.info/en/HDR/Retrofit#pipeline-remastering
https://wiki.special-k.info/HDR/Remaster
https://wiki.special-k.info/HDR/Remaster#remaster-database
and there’s also an HDR channel in the special k discord