HDR looks washed out on Windows

Why it happens

Almost everything on your desktop — web pages, Discord, most games' menus — is SDR content. When HDR is on, Windows has to map that SDR content into a much wider brightness range, and its default guess is conservative. The result reads as low contrast and drained colour.

The second cause is the monitor. A display that reports HDR support but has a low peak brightness and no local dimming cannot show the range HDR asks for, so it flattens it. Turning HDR on can genuinely make the picture worse on that kind of panel, and turning it back off is a legitimate answer.

The settings that actually change it

Open Settings, then System, then Display, then HDR. There is a slider there called SDR content brightness. That single slider is what most people are looking for — it controls how bright SDR content is drawn inside the HDR range, and the default is usually too low.

Then install the Windows HDR Calibration app from the Microsoft Store. It walks you through three test patterns and writes a proper profile for your monitor. It is free, it takes about two minutes, and it fixes more washed-out HDR complaints than anything else on this page.

Check your monitor's own menu too. Many panels have several HDR modes with names like HDR Standard, HDR Vivid or HDR Game, and they behave very differently.

What PlexusX does and does not do here

Being straight about this: PlexusX does not process an HDR signal. Its colour controls work on the standard display pipeline, and pretending otherwise would be a claim we cannot stand behind.

What it is useful for is the other half of the question. A great many people turn HDR on because their picture looks flat, when what they actually wanted was more saturation and better contrast in SDR — which is exactly what the app's controls do, on any GPU, with no calibration and nothing to reset.

If HDR is genuinely helping your monitor, keep it and use the two settings above. If it never looked right, turning it off and lifting saturation instead is worth trying before you buy a new screen.