Your stream looks washed out because two settings disagree
Grey blacks and blown highlights are not a camera problem. They are two parts of your chain using different scales for the same pixel.
Your footage looks fine in the preview. On the platform it looks flat. Blacks sit grey. Whites lose detail.
Nobody changed the picture. Two settings disagreed about how to read it.
Two scales, one image
An 8-bit pixel holds a value from 0 to 255. Full range uses all of it. Limited range uses 16 to 235 and reserves the rest.
The reserved space is not waste. It exists so a filter that overshoots has somewhere to put the overshoot instead of clipping. Broadcast video has worked this way for decades. Rec. 709 assumes it.
What a mismatch does
| Sent as | Read as | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Limited | Full | Blacks lift to grey. Contrast drops. The picture looks hazy. |
| Full | Limited | Blacks crush, highlights clip. Shadow and cloud detail disappear. |
Both look like a bad camera. Neither is.
Set OBS output to limited range for streaming. Players and platforms assume it.
Where it goes wrong
The chain has more than one place to set this. Your capture card has a range setting. Your GPU driver has one. OBS has one under Advanced. A game may output either.
They do not have to agree, and nothing warns you when they do not. One conversion is correct. Two conversions cancel out and look right by accident. Three go wrong again.
How to test it in a minute
- Put a full black and full white patch on screen at the same time.
- Stream it. Watch the output on a different device, not the preview.
- If black reads as dark grey, you sent limited and something read it as full.
- If you cannot see the difference between 95% white and 100% white, you crushed the top.
Check the output, never the preview. The preview runs before the step that breaks it.
Sources
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.