Windows 11 includes a built-in image processing algorithm designed to automatically adjust the lighting, contrast, and colour balance of videos playing on your PC in real-time. This feature attempts to take dark, muddy videos and make them look HDR-ready. While this sounds great in theory, the constant, automatic shifting of contrast can ruin the artistic intent of a film, cause unnatural skin tones, and consume unnecessary GPU resources on laptops. If you prefer to watch your videos exactly as the creator intended them to look, you should turn this enhancement feature off.
How to Stop Automatic Video Enhancements
You can disable the post-processing algorithm directly in the main Windows Settings app.
- Open the Settings app (press the Windows Key + I).
- In the left-hand sidebar menu, click on Apps.
- From the main list of app settings, click on Video playback.
- Look for the section titled “Battery options and video enhancement.”
- Locate the toggle switch labelled Process video automatically to enhance it.
- Click the switch to move it to the Off position.
Windows will immediately stop applying its artificial HDR-style filters to your media. Keep in mind that this setting primarily affects videos played through built-in Windows applications (like the Media Player or Movies & TV app) and Edge, but may not affect third-party video players like VLC, which use their own independent rendering engines.