Will try and explain this as best I can because it's kind of convoluted and I can't really "show" an example; my screenshots look good and normal and my OBS Studio captures/streams look good and normal, but MSFS looks ridiculous now on my monitor while night flying after messing around with HDR settings.
I have a 4080 GPU and I'm running MSFS 2024 on Windows 11 with two "monitors": a Samsung HDR-ready 4K that used to look great with the game, and a TCL 4K tv off to the side for running OBS streams and vPilot and Volanta and stuff.
I turned on HDR one day in MSFS settings and it looked bad, super washed out and yellowish during night flights, the native flashlight effect was so washed out and terrible looking. There was a weird distracting bloom on the streetlights and runway lights etc, it was just bad.
Then I read that you need to ALSO turn HDR on inside of Windows graphics/display settings (DUH) so I did that and it looked pretty amazing, ambiance was back for nighttime flights, good deep black contrasts, exactly what you would expect out of a game with good graphics and HDR support. I went through all of the Windows-native HDR calibration settings, and looked up the best ratings.com settings for my monitor as well, given the conditions.
But when I would stream, I saw how bad it looks because OBS and other streaming platforms can't really capture HDR very well (or you can but you gotta jump through a bunch of hoops with the bitrate and this and that and I followed a few tutorials on how to do this but it still never looked good). Screenshots were all messed up looking too. So I just decided to turn it all off and I disabled HDR in Windows settings, turned off Auto-HDR, and turned HDR off in MSFS graphics settings but now it's like stuck. Daytime flights look passable but I pretty much only fly at night and it looks now like it did when I had MSFS HDR on and Windows HDR off. Bloomy and yellow and bad. But when I use OBS Studio to stream, the streams and recordings turn out okay!
Aside from playing with HDR on/off, I have reviewed my in-game Graphics settings for MSFS as well and there's just nothing that would cause this. I'm using TAA so that rules out any of the DLSS blurry stuff and unless there's some hidden "make every light source look awful" toggle in here I don't believe my culprit lies in these graphics settings.
What disagreement do I have right now with my setup to where I'm seeing half-HDR yuckiness on my main Samsung panel but OBS is capturing a better picture?
Variables at play here: Windows display settings, MSFS HDR settings, using two different monitors with their own unique capabilities, OBS Studio stream settings, or just a random software bug that's going to require a full reinstall (hope not)