4/4 We are in a situation where both of the biggest game engines in the world, UE & Unity, or OSes like Windows, use improper encoding/decoding for SDR content, causing irreparable, long-lasting damage

I'm praying for the day the industry will start taking colors seriously!

3/4 Devs think they can handle color science through AI, without experts
Reality is that it's highly unreliable on that; it's not any better than a non-expert human
Not even reading color standards papers will save you, given these are often not followed by display manufacturers

2/4 Jump to 2025: AI is still spreading & justifying these practices, due the code bases it's trained on.
I just got this response from it

Calculating luminance from gamma space as BT.601 is not a good approx of doing it in linear BT.709. Math proves it. FXAA had this error too!

I'm sure some of the cinematics artists behind these noticed, but couldn't figure out what was wrong. Sad to know their work was not shown as it was meant!

Games I know are affected (all fixed by Luma mods):
- Starfield
- Burnout Paradise Remastered
- Mafia III
- Just Cause 3
- Lego City Undercover

2/3 How do I know they were wrong?
3 ways to tell
-Color graph goes out of range
-Luminance goes below 0 after decode (also due to full/limited range mismatch)
-Bink info tools
-Game is made after ~2004,BT601 wasn't a thing anymore
-Looking with my eyes

Red and green in particular appear different!

I had linked the wrong download link 😥:
github.com/Filoppi/Luma...

@thumpergame.com @puddlestudio.bsky.social

Video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXjA... (it's not HDR yet, youtube is slow to process it)

There's many things I don't like about youtube. But unfortunately it's a lost fight. They won and there's nothing we could ever do.

4/3
Original vs IGN version
I don't know what kind of color space mismatch or xyY chroma loss could have happened, but I'm sure it's possible to avoid this.

Yeah I do the same too, but for some reason youtube keeps pushing IGN re-uploads as first result when you search for a game... Sometimes it's genuinely hard to find the original.

3/3
It's kinda funny that almost everybody in game dev thinks that HDR is a mess and non standardized, while this proves the sad reality: SDR is even less standardized and easier to mess up than HDR.

More pics here.

2/3
Reds and greens are shifted by a good 5% (0-255)
The monster above goes from emitting a threatening red to a more friendly orange. Not to mention the added banding

I'm no editing expert, but why is the biggest game news outlet in the world unable to re-encode without a quality and color loss?

Yes!

Yes. But they could also offer graphics quality boost, like resolution and other graphics settings you'd find on pc.

3/3
My dream is that PS/Xbox games could have a hidden next gen mode that Sony/MS could whitelist when they release the next consoles, if it runs according to their standards
So many old games wouldn't be stuck at 30fps 1080p anymore due to lack of dev resources for patching

2/3
I really hope more games adopt these ideas too, with the way things are, consoles versions of games aren't final anymore, so leaving room for games to run or look better on future hardware, without further patches, is ideal