Help with unlit texture/material washed out.

I just created a brand new project in 4.9 and imported a mesh from 3dsmax. It brought in the texture and generated a material from it. I then went into the material and set it to unlit. No matter what I do it is washed out and I’m not sure what to do about it.

The right side of the screenshot below shows the texture as it is in photoshop prior to saving the PNG. The left side shows the image after it is imported into unreal. Behind the textures you will see the mesh in the viewport. I also tried unchecking the sRGB on the texture (which does in fact take away the washed out look) HOWEVER it continues to show the washed out texture in the material and viewport.

What could I be doing wrong?

Thank you for any help provided!

Hi!

Your PSD texture in 16-bit mode. This is Linear texture and in the UE4 you need disable sRGB interpretation.

Please read all of my post and you will see I tried that, but viewing the material did not reflect the changes even though the texture did.

UE4 incorrectly work with Linear images. You need manually delete gamma from your image, if you want import to UE4 PSD in 16-bit mode. As you can see, textures have a little difference. Value 0.45 this is inverse of Gamma 2.2.
Use in UE4 linear images for color texture not good idea.

What is the recommended approach. Should I just output all psd files to 8-bit pngs?

If you need, you can continue work in Photoshop in 16-bit mode. Before export, you just need switch to 8-bit mode and save to PNG or TGA.