GTA 6 Trailer's HDR Looks Like a Cheap Upgrade, Expert Claims

An HDR and color grading specialist says Rockstar may have used a low-cost SDR-to-HDR conversion for the GTA 6 trailer, pointing to blue hues turning purple in bright scenes.

Rockstar's GTA 6 trailer might be hiding a technical shortcut, and one industry expert isn't thrilled about it. Filippo Tarpini, a veteran HDR and color grading specialist at Gamma Studios, took to social media to break down the latest trailer frame by frame — and he thinks the studio may have skipped proper HDR in favor of a cheaper SDR-to-HDR upgrade.

Here's the catch: the trailer itself is in SDR, but Tarpini says you can still read Rockstar's color pipeline from it. Overall, things look solid — smooth gradients, great skin tones, and hue shifts that behave mostly as they should. Some clipping is inevitable in SDR, of course. But one glaring exception stands out: bright blues turning purple. He points to the pool scene, where lights should push the blue water toward a lighter shade, yet the brightest spots go violet instead.

That, according to Tarpini, is a classic symptom of per-channel tone mapping. Engines like Unreal and ACES have built-in "blue fix" workarounds to soften the issue, though they can introduce banding and other artifacts. So Tarpini suspects Rockstar went with a per-channel approach called AgX — a method he says usually can't escape the problem and may even make it worse since it lacks gamut adaptation. AgX also has no official HDR implementation, and as Tarpini puts it, "nobody in the industry seems able to mathematically adapt it to HDR."

Citing analysis from game modder MusaRenoDX, Tarpini suggests Rockstar's HDR may rely on inverse tone mapping without adding extra detail to highlights. In other words, the bright parts of the image get stretched rather than genuinely expanded.

He didn't mince words about what that would mean: "This is not a good sign! If the biggest game in the world uses a cheap SDR-to-HDR upgrade method, that's really a shame. But when it comes to HDR, we're often used to expecting the worst. I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised." To be fair, Tarpini also praised the trailer's explosions, noting they're "clearly tuned very well for SDR too."

GTA 6 is set to launch on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Whether the final game ships with proper HDR or a quick conversion remains to be seen — but for display nerds, it's a detail worth watching. What do you think — does the trailer's color grading bother you, or are you just happy to see the game running at all?