Advice on HDR monitors, screenshots, and video capture?

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
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One of my current monitors (two 24" Dell 4K monitors, non-HDR) has developed a column of bad pixels, so I’m planning to replace it and shuffle things so a new monitor sits in the ideal position for use on Flight Simulator. :slight_smile:

I’m looking for advice on using HDR from people who are happy with their HDR experience – all of the posts I’ve found about HDR on this forum are people complaining it doesn’t work, or that they don’t like how it looks and asking how to turn it off. I want to know what does work.

What are the best brands to go for for hardware, in terms of brightness and color reproduction in HDR mode? I’m looking for something at 4K resolution, in the 27" to 32" range, and will use it primarily during daytime in a room that gets indirect sunlight filtered through blinds.

My GPU is an RTX 2070 Super, and I can use either DisplayPort or HDMI cables as appropriate for the monitor.

Note that I take a LOT of screenshots, so screenshots and video captures that look good are absolutely essential. If I cannot take good-looking screenshots and videos while in HDR mode on an HDR monitor, then I will skip HDR entirely.

I’m currently using the NVIDIA capture overlay provided via the GeForce Now app, but would be happy to use other programs if they work well and successfully capture good-looking images and videos while in HDR mode that can be posted on social media and YouTube, without requiring that the viewer have an HDR monitor to see them as looking generally good.

Again, if that’s something that’s impossible – that’d be very useful information for me, as it would let me know whether I should skip HDR entirely and get a non-HDR monitor. But if it’s possible, I like the idea of brighter brights and darker darks, and being able to make out more details when there’s a very high contrast scene.

Thanks for any help!

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What formats are you using to capture HDR screenshots and video?

Edit: Sorry, just re-read and seen you don’t currently have an HDR monitor. Don’t have any experience of them myself, but can think of a fair few obstacles you’ll have to overcome to publish HDR content online. All your capturing and editing software must support it, and you obviously need to use compatible image/video formats throughout. It’s a bit of a minefield.

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Yeah that’s why I’m asking. :wink:

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I’m using MSFS with my Sony 55" 4K HDR TV. HDR looks good. But you’ll have to enable Windows HDR with MSFS HDR and the proper cable to drive them. I’m using HDMI 2.1 cable from my GPU to my TV.

As for screenshots. I don’t think there’s any image format that can capture HDR information. So any screenshot will always look washed out no matter what.

But using the GeForce experience video capture, you can record everything in 4K 60fps HDR. And they generally look good. I have posted a few of my recordings in that format in my YouTube channel.

The only problem is, you can’t do Live Broadcast in HDR mode and only locked to 1440p at 60 fps. Since I need to record my whole flight and store it in my YouTube channel, I stopped using HDR and just fly in SDR mode.

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Oof. . sounds like I should skip HDR then if you can’t do screenshots well. Thanks!

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Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I think there’s only 4 file formats that can store HDR images: .HDR .EXR .TIFF and .PSD

Files like JPEG and PNG are not designed to store HDR images so they won’t work.

I’m not sure if GeForce Experience can take HDR screenshot in .TIFF format. But the last time I tried it, it takes PNG instead and it becomes washed out because it can’t convert the HDR signal to SDR.

Even if it can convert the signal successfully, the end result would be an SDR image anyway as long as it’s not sorted as .TIFF file.

Then there’s the issue of displaying them. What happens if it’s being viewed using non-hdr display? Does it have built-in SDR conversion like YouTube does with their HDR videos? So many questions.

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For monitors HDR isn’t very good unless you’re willing to spend over $1000. HDR on an LCD really only works well if you have lots of dimming zones and most “HDR capable” monitors don’t even have any zones. Some semi decent ones have like 16 zones. The good ones have almost 400 or more dimming zones.
Here is an excellent article at TFTCentral that does a really good job explaining HDR on computer monitors.

It is possible to take screenshots in HDR using the Xbox Game Bar. When in HDR mode it’ll take 2 screenshots one in PNG format and one as a .JXR file (JPEG XR). The JXR file will be in HDR and can be viewed with the Windows Photo Viewer. If you plan on sharing your screenshot online you would have to find a program that can edit JXR’s and tone map it down to SDR.

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Thanks; good to know that at least the Game Bar has some support. But if I have to manually pipe all my uploads through a program to custom tone-map them, that’s a non-starter for me. Way too much trouble.

Thanks for the info!

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But why do you need to tone map the JXR again? Since it’s already taking PNG as well. I would have expected the PNG format was automatically toned down to SDR. And just upload the PNG. The JXR can be kept on your own or for people who has a compatible HDR display.

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The PNG does look like it was tone mapped but from the couple of sample screenshots I just took you lose a lot of detail since you have no control over the tonemapping.

Sure it looks better than the washed out/just plain messed up screen shots you’d get from Steam or just using PrintScreen, but it’s going to look way different than what you saw on your monitor when you took the screenshot. To get it to look right (or the way you want it) you’d have to treat it like processing a RAW file from a camera and tweak the levels.

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I use Geforce with HDR on to take screenshots, It’s saved in EXR format about 90 mb in size, then i convert it to BMP/PNG with photoshop. Here’s an example i uploaded below.

Yes correct.

EXR

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So I ended up going with the LG 34GP83A-B, which met the size/resolution/specs I wanted and I didn’t worry about it having only the lower end of defined HDR compatibility (HDR400 level). Just for fun though when I hooked it up, I tried it out to see whether I want to use it later; my feelings remain mixed, though it does give a noticeable “pep” to my picture with an increased contrast ratio, which is nice in bright sunlight where previously the limited dynamic range of a standard monitor meant things would be either too bright or too dark.

Using the GeForce overlay for screenshots, I had a lot of trouble until I tried turning off my second monitor (which is not HDR). This seemed to convince GeForce that my game, running in HDR on an HDR monitor, really should be captured in HDR mode. :stuck_out_tongue:

In this mode, screenshots save a badly range-compressed .png and a .jxr which I can’t use in anything so far other than viewing it in the Windows Photos app. The .jxr files are shown with darker areas intact but lighter areas badly blown out, and there’s no way to correct it through “adjustments”.

I don’t know what other tools exist to work with .jxr files, and am not finding really clear recommendations searching online.

Videos seem actually better here – video captures are recorded by GeForce as .mp4 with HEVC codec, and the bit-depth/color-space/transfer-function set to HDR10 specs. They play back in Photos/Videos and in VLC, but while darker areas transfer perfectly, the lightest areas such as bright clouds still get a bit blown out. I’m not sure why this is.

I’m not yet sure how the HDR videos look when viewed on an SDR screen (either directly or via down-conversion on YouTube) and will have to test this. [Viewing the video in Windows 10 Photos app on non-HDR setting results in completely blown out brights, like looking at the .jxr)

Additionally, trimming an HDR video with the built-in Windows Photos app results in an error saying I don’t have file permissions (???), so I would need a new tool for trimming videos prior to uploading. Sigh.

If I can find a good convenient tool for tone mapping the .jxr files into regular .jpgs, and if they actually contain the data necessary, and the videos can be trimmed, and the videos can be fixed for the blown-out high-end data, that might work ok. Otherwise, it goes back off and I enjoy my large ultra-wide screen and pretend HDR never happened. :wink:

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I tried uploading an HDR video capture to YouTube, with mixed results. Processing took several hours for a ~5-minute video at 3440x1080 up to 60fps.

The SDR version is automatically tone-mapped and ends up looking pretty decent, with slight blow-outs in the bright areas.

The HDR version, only visible in Chrome not in Firefox, shows the same massive blow-outs in bright areas that I see viewing the video directly, or when MSFS is windowed or doesn’t have focus. Very disappointing.

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Thanks for posting these updates. I don’t have an HDR monitor, but thought it looked fantastic on the TV.

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I’m like @BeardyBrun, I watched your video on my 4K HDR TV that is connected to my PC that I also use for MSFS as well. And I use Edge browser to watch it and your HDR video looks fantastic to me.

To prevent the time consuming processing, I suggest you try doing live broadcast using Mirillis Action. It supports 4K HDR at 60fps straight to your YouTube channel. So no need to wait for processing as it’s done in real time and SDR conversion simultaneously too. But you need fast internet of course… If you don’t then recording then uploading it would be the only way to do it.

I’m starting to see a pattern here though… People using HDR TV tend to see fantastic HDR both on Windows and games including MSFS. But for people using HDR Monitor seems to be getting more HDR issues. I wonder why… lack of automatic tone-mapping and HDR-SDR conversion maybe?

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Yeah I’m beginning to think the problem is with the final re-grading to the display output: that is, many monitors don’t actually have very good HDR, whereas TVs that have it will optimize specifically for it.

Basic HDR400 means the maximum brightness on my monitor is only around 400 nits, which is still a big step up from SDR but a lot less than a good TV could do. Higher-end monitors with HDR600, HDR1000, and higher levels exist, but you have to hunt around and they may cost more.

I think what’s going on is that in just the right circumstances while playing within MSFS, it takes the full HDR range of the rendered image and caps the high-end bright areas based on my display profile, resulting in an image that looks better than SDR but doesn’t blow out.

Whereas if another app is in foreground, or in windowed mode, or when playing back the video capture, this doesn’t seem to happen – and the brightest areas are too bright for HDR400 limits and ends up blowing out.

Meanwhile on your higher-end TV, the same video plays back fine because your TV can handle the high-end brights that my monitor can’t.

Yeah, this kinda makes sense. :slight_smile: If you really want HDR, I’d recommend researching monitors claiming at least HDR600 (and HDR1000 might be wiser) and read an actual review first. :wink:

As it happens, I’m happy to turn it back off for now if I can’t resolve my issues; it feels like early adopter stuff still and there’s a lot of these rough edges. :smiley:

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Ooh I’ll check that out too!

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Yeah, all my recent livestream that has 4K HDR 60fps on my Neo - YouTube channel is using the Mirillis Action app. It’s a lot better than the GeForce experience because I don’t get logged out of YouTube account mid-flight and it doesn’t have the audio crackling.

I’m still trying to figure out why my ATC comms are not picked up by the app, while I can hear it on my sound system.

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An interesting article (from the app developer perspective) from Microsoft on HDR issues in Windows apps/games: Using DirectX with high dynamic range displays and advanced color - Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs

Points out that display capabilities differ, and it’s required to do tone-mapping of HDR content to match the display capabilities (which seems to happen – but only sometimes – in MSFS).

Oh and one more data point – switching from HDMI to DisplayPort didn’t change any of my HDR stuff in this case. (But it did let me turn on G-Sync, so yay!)

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Here’s the state of my testing on HDR screenshots using the GeForce Experience overlay:

It saves a JPEG XR (.jxr) file, which should be full HDR but when I view it in Windows Photos app, it’s wildly overexposed, much worse than expected, and there’s no way to recover the blown-out data with the editing adjustments.

Opening the .jxr in Photoshop with the plugin from Microsoft Research gives me a 32-bit-per-channel RGB image… that is still absurdly overexposed, with no way to recover the blown-out data with the editing adjustments.

What has mostly worked is opening the additional PNG (.png) file, which is marked without a colorspace and compresses the HDR dynamic range into 8 bits per channel, so could result in banding artifacts when re-expanding.

In Photoshop, I can set it up to assign it with a Rec. 2100 color space which seems to give me better color reproduction than if I let it work in the default sRGB. (Rec. 2100 is the color space standard for HDR TV, and is probably what the HDR10 frame buffer is using.) However I had to manually configure a custom color space because there’s no preset for Rec. 2100 in the current version of Photoshop:

custom rgb rec 2100 b

Load up the .png, assign the Rec. 2100 color profile, and do ‘Auto Tone’ or ‘HDR Toning’ or manually adjust the levels or curves or brightness/contrast until it looks how you want it.

For most reliable results I recommend also converting back to sRGB at the end, in case whatever you post the image to doesn’t correctly handle color profiles!

.png converted straight to .jpg as false sRGB:

Microsoft Flight Simulator Screenshot 2021.04.17 - 18.02.10.20 ungraded
Microsoft Flight Simulator Screenshot 2021.04.17 - 18.02.10.20 ungraded3440×1440 167 KB

.png loaded as Rec. 2100, ran ‘Auto Tone’, converted to sRGB, saved.

Microsoft Flight Simulator Screenshot 2021.04.17 - 18.02.10.20
Microsoft Flight Simulator Screenshot 2021.04.17 - 18.02.10.203440×1440 258 KB