Sudden Brightness Decrease + Blown Out Colors

[nmeed]

I never had these issues with the hardware brightness upscaling but alas looks like we are stuck with software for now. In any case, I'll be at 130% brightness for instance and then suddenly I'll find myself at 98%. That keeps on happening over and over, regardless of how the ambient light is. I figured it might be somehow connected to auto brightness, even though it's not a gradual decrease rather than a sudden and abrupt one, and I tried to turn it off. With auto brightness off, all of the colors get blown out as soon as I go above 100% brightness. I'm not sure what the connection is there but there definitely is one. When I increase the brightness with auto brightness on, I don't suffer from that. As an aside, any hope for a workaround for hardware brightness control? Thank you.

[waydabber]

Are you using any other app that might affect the color table (flux etc?). Can you give a bit more details on the setup?

[nmeed]

I am not using any such apps, I'm pretty stock outside of BetterDisplay. I'm on a 16in MacBook Pro M3 Max.

[waydabber]

Do you have maybe "Continuous software XDR upscaling readiness" set to off under "Advanced upscaling..." settings under Overview? Turning this off will put the screen out of EDR mode below 100% - then it takes time for the display to ramp up EDR again on upscaling, temporarily showing overblown but still SDR-capped luminance levels.

[nmeed]

No, it was on....

[waydabber]

I see. Well, I have no idea. What you describe seems to indicate the display going out of EDR mode, but I am not sure. Maybe if you can do a video about the issue (note: it's difficult to video brightness changes using the phone - if you do so, try to do it in a well lit environment in a way that the display itself does not influence auto-exposure, or disable auto-exposure in the photo app you use - otherwise brightness changes will not be visible on the video).

[waydabber]

I'll move this over to discussions and see if there are others who experience the same now that 26.3 is released and app version v4.1.5 stable is out.

[VACInc]

I'm noticing what I am thinking is worse brightness since upgrading to 26.3 on my M1 MBP; not so much the color issue (if anything they look slightly washed out now?).

But yeah the brightness seems worse like HDR is no longer functioning -- but things get dimmer the second I kill the app until I start it back up 🤔

[VACInc]

Might be centralized to iTerm after using the system for a minute

[nmeed]

I found a "solution" of sorts by accident. I disabled "enable color adjustments" as I figured the screen being blown out had to do with color adjustments, then the "metal" option came up so I enabled that. The colors were still blown out so then I enabled auto brightness which fixed the colors. The interesting thing is though when I then disabled auto brightness the colors didn't get blown out anymore. Then I disabled metal and enabled the color adjustments again and everything is back to normal. I have no clue why it worked or how it worked but it worked.