Hey, I’m slowly losing my mind over a color management issue and hoping someone here knows the fix. Basically, my viewport colors just won’t match my outputs. I’m currently in UE 5.6 (tested in 5.3 too, exact same thing). I even set up a clean default project with a Colorchecker just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. The viewport looks nice and saturated, but whenever I take a HighRes Screenshot or render it out, the file looks visibly desaturated when I open it in Photoshop or the default Windows Photos app. Here’s the weird stuff I noticed while troubleshooting:
If I open the washed-out render in Photoshop and Assign Profile (picking my specific monitor’s profile), the colors snap back and match the viewport perfectly. BUT once I save that file, it goes right back to being desaturated. Same thing happens even if I convert it to sRGB before saving.
If I drag and drop the render directly into PureRef, the colors look correct.
If I use the Windows Snipping Tool to grab a piece of the viewport, the snip preview looks perfect. But the moment I save that snip to my drive, the saved image loses the saturation again.
It feels like some weird conflict between Windows, UE, and how ICC profiles are being embedded (or stripped) when saving files. Has anyone dealt with this? How do I get my outputs to actually bake in the viewport colors permanently so they look the same everywhere?
