Sharex: Does Not Support HDR

[SKILLEDxKILLAH]

Appears that even on the latest version of ShareX; that HDR over-brightens and saturates screenshots on applications that use GPU rendering.

With HDR off

With HDR on

[Aholicknight]

Is there a way to turn down the brightness?

[SKILLEDxKILLAH]

Any info on this?

[Nou4r]

This is a serious issue.

[Jaex]

Any info on this?

I have no clue how to fix it. I also don't have HDR monitor.

[Nou4r]

Send me your adress, i will donate you one.

[Aholicknight]

@Nou4r uhhh

[Dulaan1]

Any update?

[Jaex]

What update?

[Dulaan1]

It won't get fixed then?

[Jaex]

I already wrote.

[PandorasFox]

The main problem is that the HDR metadata isn't easily exposed and likewise isn't present in the end result.

I think that getting the HDR metadata is driver dependent? It might be possible to pull the metadata out of the monitor EDID and then recombine that with the captured bitmap and export an exr file, but it's a load of work for a really small usecase.

Nvidia has Ansel that supports HDR screenshots. I haven't actually been able to take color-corrected screenshots with AMD's Relive on my rig - SDR content is color-adjusted to be HDR for the monitor, which is what causes the problem. I haven't actually tested taking screenshots of native HDR content on my HDR monitor (mainly since I have none yet), but my suspicion is that it would look correct - this page mentions that SDR content on an HDR monitor would look too bright, which is the issue we're looking at.

My monitor has an emulated HDR mode where SDR content isn't adjusted by Windows to be HDR, but instead the monitor does some bullshit in order to make it look HDR. I have no clue how it does this, but it looks identical to when windows adjusts SDR content for HDR mode - my assumption being that in this mode, HDR content would be played in SDR and then emulated back into HDR. So at least for me, the emulated mode is the solution for fixing mixed SDR/HDR screenshots.

(I think that the 'cannot fix' on this is the correct route; the engineering required to do this would be far more effort than it's worth, especially assuming that HDR support in drivers/Windows APIs/etc improves over time as HDR displays become more prevalent.)

[Nou4r]

I literally have to disable HDR on my Monitor that i paid several thousands dollar for just because ShareX doesn't support it yet.

[PandorasFox]

It looks like there's actually a workaround in windows now: you can adjust the brightness of SDR content that is on an HDR monitor and that seems to fix screenshots.

For the below screenshots, I had firefox spanning across my primary (non-hdr) monitor on the right, and my hdr monitor on the left.

You can see that with the SDR brightness at its lowest setting that screenshots appear correct.

Additionally, I took the following two screenshots with window's snipping tool, just to double check and make sure nothing else handles this:

Not even Windows's built-in screencapping tool takes "correct" screenshots because of the nature of enabled-hdr with sdr content. There is literally nothing that ShareX can reasonably do to take "correct" screenshots - so far the only solution is to use a tool built into NVIDIA's drivers.

[ghost]

so far the only solution is to use a tool built into NVIDIA's drivers.

so if we have AMD we can just go get f**ed?

[coty-crg]

+1 why can't this be fixed? just check if the display is in HDR, and have a setting to scale the intensity of the image? Or, just take the screenshot in an HDR format if the screenshot is on an HDR display, like .exr or something.

[PandorasFox]

Adding in some more info to this: my non-hdr monitor recently kicked the bucket (😭) and I replaced it with a monitor with HDR capabilities. My screenshots of SDR content all look normal now - so my assumption is that either the weird screenshots are due to mixing HDR and SDR displays (and Windows does weird stuff to compensate), or a Windows update fixed this in the background at some point.

If anyone has mixed hdr & sdr panels, I'm interested to see the results of some screenshots that span both monitors vs disabling/unplugging the SDR panels and repeating - I believe that this is most definitely a weird windows quirk.

[Aubron]

Also suffering from the issue, it isn't completely universal (but windows game bar is cheating, they make the OS), but I have a _mitigation strategy_ for those who love ShareX's editing but need/want HDR content:

1. I press Win + Alt + prntscrn (The default keybind for windows game bar captures)
2. Windows game bar captures the current window, as a png (and a jxr but we ignore that) and puts it in its capture directory
3. Folder monitor sees that a new file is in that directory, launches "C:Program FilesShareXShareX.exe" -ImageEditor "%s" (I used "NewFileGo" as a filemonitor for testing, but I'll probably write a powershell version at some point)
4. ShareX opens the file in its built in image editor (who knew such things were possible), which allows me to crop and edit as I am used to
5. After hitting the check mark here, sharex closes and runs after capture upload tasks as usual
6. HDR Screenshot that isn't near-illegible

They sometimes come out a little dark, but overall it's a much better experience

[Aubron]

@Jaex is there any way to get a sharex watch folder to trigger an "action"? This workaround would be a lot easier if so, but as far as I can tell watch folders just trigger upload tasks, without the option to edit them. Even just a option to edit a watch folder screenshot would be good enough to simplify the workaround.

[mrzone64]

I think this issue can be resolved by HDR to SDR tone mapping?