Color Correction Distortion?

[Pink Panther]

Okay, I honestly have no idea what the heck is wrong with this but in Source (Specifically HL2) it seems that color correction on my system goes whack. Actually, I have no idea if it's color correction or not but the end G-man monologue starts fine and then turns purple. I have disabled color correction and HDR (not that it matters, HL2 doesn't use HDR anyway). Below are two screenshots of what I mean. One is what the scene starts off looking like, the second is what it becomes for the rest of the game/into the credits. Also, I don't know if this is just a result of the contrast being hiked through the roof but brighter textures become grainy along with the purple distortion.

Normal: http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/8113/d ... 033mn4.jpg

Distorted: http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/3125 ... 035sz0.jpg

I am running on an Asus ATi 4850 HD, and have no overclocking/overdriving tweaks in place (nor have I ever tweaked this card). I don't recall ever seeing this sort of thing happen on my 8800 GTS, so I hope it's not brand related. My drivers are up to date, and all of the special card tweaks (AA, Color correction, mipmap etc.) are disabled or set to use application settings. If it matters, the only commands I have in my autoexec.cfg are mat_picmip -10, r_lod 0, and g_ragdoll_maxcount 25.

Has anyone else had this happen? And if so, how the heck do you fix it?

Edit: Further testing has shown that this does not happen in DirectX 8 mode. I'm still poking around though, running in Dx 8 for something like this seems rather ridiculous.

[burninwater]

on a totally non helpfull thing (sorry about that) that pink explosion looks awsome

[TicTac]

I second that. Also on a non-helpful note, that didn't happen to me. Possibility of corrupted files, but I highly doubt that. You don't run any weird monitor settings, right?

[Pink Panther]

Nope. I've tried (re)-installing the latest DirectX version, defragging my cache files, verifying cache integrity, turning off all custom content, I can't figure it out. I have a hunch that my card isn't recognized by the older engine and cannot cope with the drivers. The dxsupport.cfg file in my bin folder doesn't have the ATi 4850 listed. Then again, it was last 'updated' in 2007, and I don't want to tweak/break something I have no knowledge about.

[xoqolatl]

Does the same happen in OB engine with color correction enabled and color correction entity active?
It might be a problem with screen overlay.

[Seraph169]

funny, i got that "error" too. its just a contrast thing. It started out normal like in picture 1 and then picked up slightly at the end like in picture 2 and everything faded, so i wasn't worried

[Pink Panther]

Does the same happen in OB engine with color correction enabled and color correction entity active?
It might be a problem with screen overlay.

I'm not sure. I've seen this happen on mods running the on the Orange Box 2007 engine, but I've since deleted them. How would I go about testing it? I'm not even sure if it's related to color correction or not but I assumed it was.

[xoqolatl]

Make a map with color_correction entity and set it to do something, for example turn image to red. Other thing could be some bug with two images overlaid, but in that case the same distortion would be seen on the beginning of the game.

[Pink Panther]

Finally solved it. For some reason or another setting the shader quality to "Low" rather than "High" fixes it. I can't notice a whole load of difference in-game so I guess I'll just keep it there until/if HL2 ever gets an engine update to the version Episode 2 uses.