I finally tried Special K HDR and...

Summary

Highlights

• Installing Special K HDR is straightforward: download, click next, and finish—simple as pie! 🥧
• Setting up might lead to crashes, especially when used alongside reshade or MSI Afterburner. Hold tight and troubleshoot! ⚠️
• Special K highlights your games wonderfully with its HDR capabilities, despite some inherent quirks. 🌈
• For consistent HDR quality, familiarize yourself with the HDR analysis tool and its settings to refine your game's visuals. ✨
• The creator praises the vivid gaming experience offered by Special K but notes the necessity for matching HDR settings to specific games. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• Exploring HDR with Special K can enhance your gaming visual experience, but requires patience and tweaking for optimal results. 🎮
• While easy to install, Special K HDR is not entirely smooth sailing; expect some crashes and compatibility issues, especially with reshade. 💻
• The HDR analysis tool offers valuable insights for fine-tuning brightness and gamma settings, although it might lead to occasional flickers. 🔧
• For the best results, learn how to utilize the available tools and adjust settings based on personal preference and display specifications. 📺
• Even with the potential for inconsistent performance, trying Special K HDR can lead to stunning visuals that breathe new life into games. 🌟

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter titled 'Introduction' discusses the limitations of using HDR video with certain tools and games. The speaker cautions against getting overly excited about this technology because it requires specific tweaks and does not work seamlessly across all games. They note that there are numerous crashes, particularly when trying to use reshade with the HDR analysis tool or MSI afterburner, highlighting that the process is not without its challenges.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Instructions and Installation The chapter focuses on providing instructions for installing a program. It assures users that the process is straightforward and requires minimal effort, described as 'next-next-finish' style. Emphasis is placed on the ease of installation compared to other programs like reshade, which necessitates separate installation for each game. A link to download the program is provided in the video description. Users are encouraged to give it a try, with the user experience described as 'amazing,' even if perfection isn't guaranteed.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Game Launch and Issues with ReShade The chapter discusses the process of launching games on a PC using a particular tool that lists supported games. The user selects a game and initiates it, hoping for a crash-free experience. The focus then shifts to attempting to get ReShade to work with Special K. Despite initial success, the narrator encounters issues with ReShade on subsequent attempts, leading to multiple trials.
• 03:30 - 05:30: HDR Configuration and Common Problems In this chapter, the author discusses issues related to HDR configuration specifically when using reshade. They explain an issue where recording a video leads to a crash, which necessitates uninstalling and reinstalling reshade. Despite these issues, the author demonstrates how to use HDR analysis tools effectively. They provide a step-by-step guide on accessing these tools using Special K software, involving the use of shortcut keys.
• 05:30 - 08:30: Troubleshooting ReShade Crashes The chapter discusses the complexity of using an advanced tool called Special K for monitoring games, highlighting the overwhelming amount of information it provides. The speaker compares it to using MSI Afterburner and describes it as 'monitoring madness' while acknowledging that some might enjoy trying it despite its overwhelming nature.
• 08:30 - 10:30: Advanced Settings for HDR This chapter discusses the challenges of configuring HDR settings within the Special K application. The process seems trial and error, with potential crashes occurring when interacting with the HDR analysis tool. Users are advised that simply running the game might work fine once it's set up, but caution is advised around the HDR tool to avoid crashes.
• 10:30 - 14:00: Comparing HDR Solutions The chapter discusses issues with HDR solutions. The speaker encounters a problem and decides to resolve it by deleting a particular problematic component, 'appreciate', which is causing trouble. Upon deletion, the issues disappear. The speaker then mentions returning to the program, reshading, and reinstalling it from the game to continue troubleshooting or improving the HDR solution.
• 14:00 - 19:30: User Control and Customization The chapter 'User Control and Customization' focuses on the experience with a new, colorful game designed for kids. It discusses the visual quality, emphasizing the colorful HDR, and the process of reinstalling a reshaping tool to optimize the game's visual settings. The speaker intends to demonstrate an HD analysis tool, exploring black levels, gamma adjustments, and other visual parameters, while launching the game post-tool adjustment to evaluate the visual improvements in HDR mode.
• 19:30 - 22:30: Conclusion and Call for User Experience Sharing The chapter provides a conclusion and encourages users to share their experiences. The focus is on resolving issues with reshading conflicting with reshape by adjusting HDR settings. It guides the reader through accessing the HDR setup menu and selecting the SC RGB HDR format, which is used by auto HDR. There are also additional settings available that can be adjusted based on the desired brightness.

I finally tried Special K HDR and... Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 foreign here is the Special K HDR video I don't want to get very excited about it because it is not perfect it requires some tweakings it doesn't work for every single game you get a lot of crashes if you want to use reshade with the HDR analysis tool if you want to use MSI afterburner it is not a smooth sailing here okay
• 00:30 - 01:00 but if you don't care about perfection if you want to have an option that works sometimes it's just amazing okay give it a try I strongly recommend you to give it a try so I'm gonna show you a special cake Link in the description of the video downloaded install it it's just next next fight finish done very easy you open it it's a program it's not like reshade that you have to do it per game just install a single program you
• 01:00 - 01:30 open it and you're gonna see listed some of the games that you have installed on your PC already that are supported and then you just select the game and you hit launch and hopefully it works and you have no crashes so now this video is like third attempt because I've been trying to get as you see here reshade working with a Special K and for some reason it works the first time I set it up
• 01:30 - 02:00 and then I hit record I try to make the video and it crashes so I have to you know uninstall reshade and do a fresh install of reshape why I don't understand this is the kind of stuff that I'm talking about I might be problematic but let me show you okay it works the first time only with reshade and I want to show you the HDR analysis tool so all you have to do when you open the game with a Special K is hit Ctrl shift and back uh you know the delete
• 02:00 - 02:30 key on your keyboard and you will see this menu you see a bunch of stuff that I have opened from a Special K because this is a very Advanced tool we have so much monitoring this is just absolute Insanity like if you want to play your games like this it's just crazy you know sometimes I like to play the games with MSI afterburner numbers in the corner but this is just Madness monitoring Madness right now but you can give it a try I don't I
• 02:30 - 03:00 don't even know what all this stuff is I would just try and see if it works so now what do you have to do to get HDR working on Special K is you just click here where it says HDR and he crushed okay that's what I'm talking about man it crashed just by touching the HDR and it's because of this HDR analysis tool okay so if I don't touch it if I just open the game and play it after I set it up it may be fine okay but it's just it
• 03:00 - 03:30 things like this happen Okay but I cannot repeat this video again I'm being completely you know clear and that this can happen so let let's figure it out so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to um just delete appreciate because it's causing an issue here it's clearly Richard like if I just delete it you'll see there's no issues let me just come here reshade and I'll install it from this game
• 03:30 - 04:00 okay this is a new game by the way it's just a recent uh you know game for kids very colorful HDR looks very good I'll show you so we uninstalled reshape let's give it a try again let's launch it hopefully it's good now and yeah I wanted to show you the HD analysis tool to talk about the black levels and the gamma adjustments and all that but now let's see if it works now I'm gonna open the tool let's click HDR
• 04:00 - 04:30 see it works it's just reshading it's conflicting with reshape so you click here on HDR click on HDR setup and you get this menu right here and all you have to do is click on you know SC RGB HDR it's just an HDR format that's the HDR format that that auto HDR uses then we have some settings here depending on the brightness that you're looking for you see here
• 04:30 - 05:00 934.5 Candelas per square meter now in my testing with the HDR analysis tool I find out that this number here is not accurate okay it's pushing a little bit more brightness most of the time and the other thing that I see is that for some reason the brightness is kind of flickering it's like it is forcing to mopping down again and again and again I think it might be
• 05:00 - 05:30 some of these menus picking up being picked up by the HDR analysis tool um it might be this thing here you see LG SS CR2 I think is this this is where the flicker is coming from but anyway it is not exactly this is the brightness that you're getting so ideally you use it on a game where you can use the HDR analysis too so you can tweak this brightness and also what you have to tweak is this uh SDR to HDR gamma okay
• 05:30 - 06:00 this default gamma I see that it works very well in some games but it is not consistent for every single game like sometimes it looks too dark near black sometimes it looks too bright sometimes you have black level race that you have to fix so you would use a reshade which it worked for me it worked one time and then when I tried to open it again it crashes you would use region you can use that
• 06:00 - 06:30 this SDR black floor emulation so use the liliums HDR black floor fixed Shader SDR black for emulation and that might fix that otherwise you can you know play around with this value if you increase it you lower the Black Level a little bit but mostly then the gamma near black is affected more than crushing so if you need to crush some black level race reset is the best option when it works in this case
• 06:30 - 07:00 it was crashing after the first try basically so I tried when it worked it worked perfect but after I opened the game one more time it was crashing so let's take a look at it basically that's all we have to do I would increase this a little bit more so yeah but I would need the HDR analysis tool or or a lot of testing to know if this is the correct value who knows it looks good regardless it's not gonna look washed out or anything let me get some of this things out of the way we have a lot of
• 07:00 - 07:30 monitoring uh one thing I would do for all the games here with my Nvidia GPU I would come here to frame limiter advance I showed this on a previous video and use Nvidia low latency plus boost okay that's going to potentially improve the latency the responsiveness of the game and then I would just let me get all these tools out of the way this on-screen display boom start
• 07:30 - 08:00 uh eliminating some of these widgets frame pacing CPU GPU latency analysis threats see we got all that out of the way and let's see how the game looks actually see it looks very good um it looks very good but the near black gamma and the Black Label is not perfect you have to you have to tweak it and the HDR analysis tool is necessary to get
• 08:00 - 08:30 the best results basically so if it's crashing that's a problem that's a problem but give it a try man give it a try you might be surprised how good it looks and how good it works when it works and yeah unless you don't you care about you know Perfection this just looks very good I mean if you're just gonna play this game no problem it just looks very very good and I'm using all of motion Pro High it is bright enough I'm using it with Dynamic tone mapping that's why you see that I
• 08:30 - 09:00 increase that brightness to over 900 nits so I'm not sure why 900 is the maximum 930 something like I had I have a hotkey here 934.5 again it's a little bit more than that but I'm not sure why you kind of go over over that um so yeah the other thing you might have to tweak is the this gamut expansion the colors might look uh overly saturated in
• 09:00 - 09:30 some games especially if you have to increase this gamma um so yeah it it requires some tweaking but it looks very good I have to say that it does look very good and this might be even better than Auto HDR if you tweak the settings because the graph looks very good the graph I would say on the using the HDR analysis uh tool when it works the graph looks very good you
• 09:30 - 10:00 don't see like those lines that are because of eight bits on the graph so it looks very solid very beautiful graph um so this might be even better than the major pain the cactus mod and the other HDR from Windows 11 but the thing is the Major Payne the characters mod is just Flawless you just need to detect the side gamma 2.2 or srgb and that's it I'm talking about a
• 10:00 - 10:30 reshade mod to force HDR 10 on the games uh that works um amazing with lilium's inverse Stone Mobby okay so I'll work so good so well um all you have to do is to detect if the game is gamma 2.2 or srgv select that on the liliums uh inverse Stone mapping and that's it it's gonna look very consistently just perfect and the auto HDR watch the videos Link in the description
• 10:30 - 11:00 where I show you the ICC profile I downloaded to fix Auto HDR for games.r gamma 2.2 okay for games that are srgb you just use the windows 11 HDR calibration app so those two methods might not be better than this in terms of quality because also there are some games that allow you to do like a 11 bits remaster and 128 bits uh remaster
• 11:00 - 11:30 something like that that it seems like it's going to add more like bit depth more information to the HDR and look even better and it looks very good I have to say the thing is it is not consistent it's not like oh you just turn it on and this gamma looks correct the black level is absolutely perfect and the color saturation looks right on every single game I cannot say
• 11:30 - 12:00 that because it's just not it's just not perfect uh you need to tweak it but here's the thing if you are already installing this you install research you get the lilium shaders the HDR analysis tool all these tools that I've been presenting to you the idea here it's not for me to become a master and being able to tell you these are the right settings you have to use or or have to you know for each game
• 12:00 - 12:30 that comes out you know me having to test a lot so I can tell you exactly the ultimate HDR settings that's not the idea here because I'm not an expert anyway I'm doing the same thing that you can do which is basically install the tools play around with them and learn how to get the picture quality that you like you might like overly saturated colors let's just increase the gamut and get wild colors that's it if that's what you like to enjoy so the best thing at the
• 12:30 - 13:00 end of the day is for us to get familiar with these options that we have available and get the best out of them okay that's it so just learn figure it out this can give you an absolutely amazing HDR no question about that you just need to tweak the settings and and figure it out and learn what you need depending on your display if you need more or less
• 13:00 - 13:30 brightness the gamma depending on your display it's a great option absolutely so give it a try let me know your thoughts and opinions if you are if you are already very experienced with a Special K and you have like some conclusions that you can share with us absolutely I am all ears for now I will still try this in more games maybe I will figure out some Global tips that I can give you a for most games use this or that I need more
• 13:30 - 14:00 testing okay so far I cannot find like a pattern like some games look absolutely amazing some games I have to tweak this gamma some games look overly saturated I have to lower the the colors the brightness is not exactly what they're telling you here sometimes and sometimes I have to fix a black level race with the lilium shaders it's not consistent so I cannot I cannot go crazy here and tell you hey this
• 14:00 - 14:30 works for everything just one click and done because it's not I have to keep it real here now and I'm telling you all the issues that I had to get this uh working and actually you saw it it was crashing and this is this is not the first attempt to make this video and the first the first time I tried to make the video I was showing you everything all the amount of times that this crash and me trying to figure it out and it was too long so I said no man I
• 14:30 - 15:00 might record another video I'm just gonna let you know that that happened um because I don't understand why the HDR analysis tool was working perfectly fine like a couple times like I was able to play the game use it play around with everything and then I just opened the game one more time it's just not working why who knows it's just PC stuff so if you have a PC learn how to do PC stuff
• 15:00 - 15:30 share your thoughts and opinions you know let's learn together and let me know if you have any questions I'll do my best to to help you out maybe I'm not very experienced yet but with this thing but I'll try my best