UE5 - Trying to understand why colors are working differently UE5

Hello! I’ve recently started working in UE5 coming from UE3. I’ve been stumped on why colors seem to be different in the Color from Curve gradients than what id expect them to be. I made the same gradient in photoshop and the unreal color curve editor, and received very different results. I think this might have something to do with srgb being applied to the gradient, but can’t find a way to change this to linear. Has anyone else encountered this and found a fix for it?

UE4 and UE5’s gradient appearance is consistent with Photoshop’s gradient in “linear mode”. While the gradient appears lighter in UE’s editor preview, the final result (unlit material under lit mode) is compensated to appear slightly darker, with the middle value appears around 0.78 instead of 0.87 (preview).

There is no easy way to make the final (unlit) result appear to be completely linear. A very very simple way is to raise the color value to the power of ~2.2, or just alter the gradient curve so the final result appears linear in the first place.

Like @ifurkend mentioned, Unreal color curves are in Linear color space, and unless you’ve changed any settings in PS, the color space is sRGB for that.

Here’s a good thread on setting up your PS color space to Linear, which should display your gradients much closer to how they appear as an Unreal color curve