Your HDR game looks grey on stream
The game looks spectacular on your monitor. On stream it looks like someone left a fog machine on. Nothing is broken, and no colour setting in OBS will fix it on its own.
You turned on HDR because the game looks better. It does, on your screen.
Your viewers get something grey and lifeless.
Two different scales
SDR encodes brightness on a curve built for displays that reach a few hundred nits. Everything assumes it. Broadcast, your capture card, your stream.
HDR uses a different curve. It covers a far wider range, past a thousand nits. The same stored number means a different brightness.
Hand an HDR frame to an SDR pipeline without converting it. Now every value is read on the wrong scale. Mid tones lift. Highlights flatten. Colour drains.
You are not looking at a picture that needs adjusting. You are looking at one scale being read as another. Adding contrast makes it less grey and still wrong.
Three ways out
| Approach | Cost | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Turn HDR off for the capture | You lose HDR on your own screen | Simplest. Right for one machine doing everything. |
| Tone map in OBS | Some GPU load | Keeps HDR local, converts for the stream. The usual answer. |
| Capture card with tone mapping | Hardware | Two-machine setups and console capture. |
Getting the tone map right
Tone mapping squeezes a wide brightness range into a narrow one. Something has to give. You choose what.
- Set the peak nit value to match your source, not your monitor. Guessing high crushes the mid tones.
- Check a dark scene and a bright scene. A map tuned on one wrecks the other.
- Watch skin tones. They shift before anything else does and viewers notice.
The trap on a two-machine rig
HDMI carries HDR metadata. Your card may pass the signal through without flagging it. Then the receiving machine reads HDR data as SDR. Nothing warns you.
Check what the card reports rather than what the picture looks like on a preview. A preview on an HDR monitor will look correct while the stream does not.
Consoles make this worse by enabling HDR on their own when they detect a capable display. Check the console setting after any cable change.
Sources
- ITU-R BT.2100 HDR television parameter values
- ITU-R BT.709 parameter values
- OBS Studio, application overview
The Rig Wire reports on streaming technology from public documentation, source repositories and vendor releases. We did not bench-test what is described here. When we have tested something, we say so.