makaveli60
Did you go back to the default/standard picture settings, after you tried out the settings given in this thread (From Rikkori)? Or did you keep those on?
I think that could be a big part of the problem here, think of contrast/light levels like a topographical map on your screen, when you are in SDR and have all those settings on (black adjust, advanced contrast enhancer, extended dynamic range and live colour) then its like you are only seeing the tops of the mountains and everthing else is chopped off, whereas when you go to HDR you see the whole depth of the image, but the average height of the peaks is much lower now, loads of "low end" detail (shadows, dark areas), with a bit of "high end" detail (highlights, the moon, fires, candles) and the rest is "middle detail", which is the same as in the SDR version of the image.
In SDR those mountain tops are all very close to each other in height so the image is very bright overall and your eyes don't notice that the blacks are significantly greyer because your eyes have adjusted to most of the image being super bright. I have to play GoT in a dark room to see everything during the darkest parts, like
pitch black I mean.
My map analogy is weird I know lol but trying to come up with new ways to describe it, WAIT! Holy crap this random video I just searched for is kind of a great companion to what I wrote above:
So mute that clip and just check out the first few seconds, the cloud layer is perfectly illustrating what I mean above, if you imagine SDR + all those settings on is making it so everything below the cloud line is cut off and only the "peaks" remain, in HDR you are seeing the whole range from "sea level" to the top of the peaks. If you imagine all the bits below the cloud line to be pulled up and compressed into the space between the clouds and the top of the peaks, thats a big part of the reason why you think everything looks so dark I think.
I'm rambling a bit so gonna stop lol