Screen Recording With HDR Enabled — What Actually Works

Screen recording with HDR enabled on a Windows display

HDR mode on Windows has a specific, well-documented incompatibility with most screen recording approaches — recordings made while HDR is enabled often look washed out or incorrectly color-mapped when played on standard SDR displays, for reasons that are worth understanding rather than just working around blindly.

Why HDR and screen recording conflict specifically on Windows

When Windows HDR is enabled, the system composites the display output in a 10-bit HDR color space before sending it to the monitor. Most screen recorders — using DXGI or GDI capture as covered in our capture API guide — capture the output before the final HDR-to-display conversion, getting raw HDR data that most video players and platforms can’t correctly interpret. The result is the characteristic washed-out look of an SDR player trying to display HDR content without tone-mapping.

The practical workaround most guides recommend first

Disabling Windows HDR (Settings → System → Display → HDR) specifically for recording sessions, then re-enabling it afterward, resolves the incompatibility entirely — the recording output is standard SDR and plays correctly everywhere. This is a real trade-off (your display looks different while recording) but it’s reliable, and for most non-HDR content being demonstrated it makes no visual difference to what’s actually captured.

“Disabling Windows HDR before recording and re-enabling it afterward is not a satisfying fix, but it’s the one that reliably produces output that plays correctly on any standard display — which is usually what matters more than recording in HDR specifically.”

Tools that handle HDR recording specifically

Mirillis Action! has explicit HDR recording support and handles the tone-mapping step more deliberately than generic recorders. OBS has HDR support in more recent versions, though it requires specific output format configuration to pass through HDR correctly. These are the practical options when you specifically need HDR in the output rather than just disabling it for recording.

When HDR in the output actually matters

Most content demonstrating software, workflows, or interfaces has no HDR content and produces no visible difference between HDR-on and HDR-off recording. HDR in the recording output specifically matters for content demonstrating HDR-capable media players, color grading workflows, or HDR games — a smaller subset of use cases than the general “I want my recording to look the same as my screen” instinct.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my Windows screen recording look washed out when HDR is enabled?
Windows HDR mode composites in a 10-bit HDR color space that most recorders capture as raw HDR data — which plays incorrectly on standard SDR displays. Disabling HDR before recording produces output that plays correctly everywhere.

Is there a way to record with HDR enabled that produces correct output?
Tools like Mirillis Action! with explicit HDR support handle the tone-mapping more correctly than generic recorders — or disable HDR for recording sessions if the content being recorded isn’t HDR-dependent.