Over-exposure in screenshots and recordings with HDR in Windows 11

Turn hdr off while taking a screenshot turn back on afterwards.

It's the only fix so far.

Turning hdr off to take screen shot works, then turning it back on afterwards is the only fix.

Please stop trying to be "helpful"

Your screenshot shows indeed that video being played uses an HDR format. "Color smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020" means HDR. I get the same format when I enable HDR for my monitor in Windows and play a HDR YouTube video. However, I can only get HDR in YouTube videos when the windows display settings for my monitor are set like this:

The second setting, for video, depends on the first one, so if "Use HDR" is off for that display, you cannot enable HDR video streaming for that display. If a video is currently being played when you disable HDR, it will continue to use the HDR format until you refresh the YouTube page, but you can verify using the OSD settings of your monitor that HDR is off, so the video is actually converted to SDR format before being sent to the display after you disable HDR in Windows for that display.

If you however refresh the YouTube page after disabling HDR for the display in Windows, YouTube will not even give the option for HDR anymore when playing videos on that display, and the "stats for nerds" will show a SDR format is being used, for example Color bt709 / bt709 instead of Color smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020. But I'm guessing that's not what's happening in your case, as you probably don't frequently change your HDR settings.

I think I know what is actually happening in your case. Do you have multiple monitors on your computer? If you look at my screenshot, there is a drop-down at the top of the screenshot specifying the monitor those settings apply to. But if you have multiple displays, you could have HDR turned On for one monitor, and HDR turned Off for another monitor. I think that's the most likely explanation. You probably think you turned HDR completely off in Windows, but you only turned it off for a single display. You could go to those settings and select each display from that drop-down, and if my hypothesis is correct you will find that one of the displays still has HDR enabled, and that's why you can still watch HDR videos on it.

Even ignoring this issue, I would advise most people to keep HDR off. Most software is incapable of handling HDR properly. The only significant exception are HDR videos, where it may be worth it to enable it.

I just bought a OLED monitor a few weeks ago, and enabling HDR in Windows makes everything washed out for SDR. OK, with a lot of tunning, I was able to get it to be acceptable. Then I played a game supporting HDR (MSFS). Didn't look much better with HDR enabled.

Then played World of Tanks, that doesn't support HDR, with auto-HDR. The results were horrible. Every dark shade of gray became a very light shade of gray. Every dark scene basically became a lot of gray. Including dark UI parts and static loading screens. There was no gradient between those grays and black. I disabled HDR, and everything looked much better again.

Then, finally, I tried playing Cyberpunk 2077, which in theory supports HDR. I've never seen worse image quality. All dark content became bright greenish gray. There was no black at all anymore in the game. Apparently the game can't generate perfect blacks with HDR enabled. I think they missed the "D" in HDR, and the range is hard coded, instead of adjusting automatically depending on the scene. I even used ReShade to adjust the gray levels closer to black, it helped, but the image was still ugly and greenish and stuff like black hair was badly rendered. Then I just disabled HDR, and the game then looked gorgeous, blacks were black again (it's not enough to disable HDR in game, it will still look bad, you need to also disable HDR in windows).

In conclusion, unless you watch HDR videos every day, or play some game that implements HDR properly (if such a thing exists), there is no reason to enable HDR in Windows, at least with OLED displays. On regular LCDs, you may want it enabled for the Auto-HDR feature that sometimes makes SDR games look better.