Washed color with HDR ?

[Drabat]

Hello,

I bought an HDR Oled screen some time ago (an AW2725DF) and I rarely use the HDR mode because it is too bright and I have the impression that the colors are strange whether in game or navigation (supported game or not)
So I wanted your opinion on this.

I tested several settings on my sDR screen with a gamma of 2.2 or 2.6 (which I prefer)
Here are the photos I took with my phone I tried to do my best so that we can see the colors between the photos but it's not easy
Here is the link: https://imgur.com/a/tkjHDWT

Here is the video used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKeUssuu3Is&t=9617s

Timecode: 9:04:29

Here if you can tell me if everything is horrible or not lol and which setting is best knowing that I would like to stay in HDR but I find the brightness aggressive

Thanks for your feedback

[RealNC]

This is normal. SDR looks washed out because Windows does not target a gamma of 2.2 for displaying SDR content in HDR mode. It targets sRGB gamma, resulting in a washed out image and raised black levels.

There's this tool that patches DWM to change its shaders to target 2.2 instead of sRGB:

https://github.com/ledoge/dwm_eotf

But at the end of the day, Microsoft just doesn't want to target 2.2. I'm not sure why. I think Microsoft are the ones who invented sRGB and they want to enforce it? I don't know.

To be sure, you should probably turn HDR off in Windows when not playing an HDR game or watching something that's HDR. You can use novideo_srgb to clamp the colors in SDR mode if your display does not have a built-in sRGB clamp option. Just remember to turn off novideo_srgb before switching to HDR, because if you don't you'll get severe image quality degradation.

(Don't get confused by sRGB gamma vs sRGB color space, btw For SDR content, you need sRGB color space, but 2.2 gamma, NOT sRGB gamma. Microsoft does use sRGB color space for SDR content in HDR mode, but also uses sRGB gamma instead of 2.2, which makes everything look dull and washed out.)

[Drabat]

Thanks for the feedback

Personally I use gamma 2.6 which I find better is there a difference between using 2.2 and 2.6?
It is not possible to stay in HDR all the time because I do not know if the content I am watching or playing is compatible it is up to me to test everything and I admit that it is restrictive to have to change each time and do you find that there is a problem with my colors? If so, for which parameter?

This is what i mean by gamma : https://imgur.com/a/JkgRNor

[Drabat]

I used the exe you told me but to be honest i don't see any differencies from before