If anyone can explain what is going on, and point me in the place of some good literature / videos i should prioritise to understand it more, i would be most grateful!
Your editor screenshot is set to Unlit viewmode, which has no post processing (including tonemapping). Switch it to Lit and it should look similar provided your exposure is set to use in-game settings.
I’m not sure what your point is; your editor is set to the unlit viewmode. It doesn’t matter if you have a post process volume, it doesn’t render in unlit. That is why your scene looks different when you play the game.
my point its my background is unlit, how do i prevent it from recieving light and washing my image out? i want it to look as it does when viewed in the unlit mode, as intended.
Unlit materials don’t function like the Unlit viewmode, they will still be affected by post processing and tonemapping, they even cast shadows. The only thing aren’t affected by is lighting. Most of the issues people have with color reproduction in Unreal is due to the tonemapper, by default Unreal uses the ACES filmic tonemapper and the #1 complaint everyone has about it is that it is too high contrast.
You probably won’t be able to get it to match perfectly without just disabling the tonemapper, which will create more problems than it solves.
By the way, just so you know Unreal has tons of post processing enabled by default. Just because you don’t enable these things in the post process volume doesn’t mean they aren’t active, out of the box Unreal has SSAO, motion blur, bloom, auto-exposure, tonemapping, and probably some other effects enabled until you explicitly disable them by setting their intensity to zero or unchecking them (depending on what setting it is)
