Ghost of Yotei
HDR analysis Ghost of Yotei on PS5 Pro.
Max Luminance:
It uses PS5's system level HDR calibration and the game outputs highlights close to that. So that's good.
In-game HDR settings:
You have a brightness slider that changes midtones and makes the game brighter overall, but it also increases black levels. And then we have two contrast options, where one significantly increases contrast by lowering black levels.
Black levels:
The game has good black levels most of the time. They are only slightly raised in some scenes, but at night time they can be very lifted, where everything looks grey and with poor contrast. But overall black levels are good.
Paper white:
My biggest issue is that the game overall looks very dim a lot of the time (when looking in the opposite direction of the Sun). It's because paper white is way too low most of the time. But it's not always so. I can’t remember a game that has different paper white in different areas of the game/map, like Yotei does ?
I have shown how dim Yotei can look compared to Death Stranding 2. It illustrates the issue perfectly.
What can we do to improve brightness ???
We can try and use LG's or Samsung's Dynamic/Active tone mapping to increase the brightness of the midtones. DTM and ATM compresses the bright highlights so there is more room for brighter midtones, so we unfortunately lose detail in bright highlights by doing so.
Instead we can use HGIG and increase the in-game brightness to 70 from 50 and use dynamic contrast. It increases paper white with around 50% and increases upper midtones with 100%. See picture 3 and 4.
The use of Dynamic contrast eliminates the black level raise we get from increasing the brightness slider. It even lowers black levels a bit so we fix the minor black level raise in many scenes.
The last solution does lower shadows significantly indoors and in dark caves. Some might think it's an issue, but I do not. We are not supposed to have detail where there is no light source to light things up.
PC:
Ghost of Tsushima has the same issues, and here I use Reshade tools to massively increase paper white for my 2000 nits TV and I lower black levels a bit using Lilliums Black Floor Fix. So we can also do the same in Yotei to improve HDR when it releases on PC.
Black level raise at night
