Windows 11 DX screen capture excesive contrast-wrong colors

[Pantera87]

After a long time user of HyperHDR on tv, I decided to build another setup for my pc monitor (in SDR mode) using screen grabber. The problem I am faced with is that the screen capture is way too dark and colors are way off. I am attaching a screenshot for reference (look at the blue bar, it should be the same hue and brightness and still way off)

My setup is as follows: one physical 4k SDR monitor as well as a virtual display that is HDR.I thought the virtual display could play a role and I tried every way from disabling HDR on the virtual display all the way to completely uninstalling. The screen capture is selected on the SDR display.

I use two multisegment strips driven by an MH-ET live ESP32 running HyperSerialESP32

I tried also Hyperion to see if it is a widespread problem and the screen grabber there works properly, even though I couldn't get HyperSerial to connect, was giving an access denied error.

Another thing I messed with was the RGB threshold values on screen capture settings to no avail.

Any more ideas?

[awawa-dev]

What is your DX current capturing configuration: make a screenshot? Did you try to disable the hardware acceleration?

[Pantera87]

Thanks for the heads up, I have never used RDP before I will do it now and see if it makes a difference.

Another long shot could be windows color management, I am using DisplayCAL to force corrected lut on the screen but trying to bypass it completely didn't make any noticeable difference aside from the changing slightly the physical colors on the display (on live preview image is still super contrasty with crushed blacks)

Just to make sure is this line included in 20.0?If not I could give it a try, fork it and recompile it using this line if it will make any difference

[awawa-dev]

This line (completely directly unrelated to DirectX) was not needed in v20, but in v21 we dropped a lot of heavy QT GUI/widgets dependencies and as a surprising side-effect DirectX suddenly stopped working: #852 (comment)
If you want test v21 here are installers: https://github.com/awawa-dev/HyperHDR/actions/runs/10324710083 but I doubt it will change anything here.

[Pantera87]

I just installed 21.0 alpha and indeed made no difference

I tried changing the multimonitor setup from extending to only pc monitor and due to some glitch both screen and the live monitor became overexposed and super bright but they were in sync. Restarting chrome, both the tab and preview went as before (tab normal color preview crushed).I think the glitch was transfering the HDR option from second display to the main one that is not HDR compatible

I am getting the feeling that VDD is the main suspect but that is really strange as I have tried not only disabling but completely uninstalling it, except if it left some remnants behind that could interfere with the screen capture

[Pantera87]

Voila I found the answer!

As I was delving deeper into the settings for color management I came across a setting under display in windows settings called Automatically manage color for apps

Changing it to off made the preview finally work as intended

Thanks for all your help!

[awawa-dev]

That's great! :) I looked for information about it and it seems that this option can generate a lot of problems with applications. It was recently also added to Win10. I couldn't find anything that would allow to block this option or how to bypass it in the API (Hyperion uses DX9 and not DX11 so that may explain the different behavior). I will add the information to the FAQ later. Thank you for your curiosity and for wanting to test different system options.