For some reason, when I impot images as sprites, they look fine in the import settings inspector, but then look dark with oversaturated colors in the sprite editor or when in play mode.
I’ve tried of course setting it to truecolor, but compression setting doesn’t seem to do anything. DX9 or DX11 does the same. An I tried some different shader materials lit/unlit, but anyway, that shouldn’t matter as the sprite is already dark in the sprite editor after import.
Here’s a screenshot with the “import” texture and the “sprite editor” version on the left, and in small you see the portrait in the game, dark as well.
It looks like it’s picking the wrong color space (sRGB vs RGB maybe?) try changing your import type so you can select the actual color space to see if that’s the problem.
Indeed, switching to gamma solves the problem, but then of course all the rest of the 3d ligthing is not linear anymore. UI should remain linear or at least have the option to choose - like NGUI used the advanced import mode to set sprites to gamma. I’ll file a bug report.
Oddly, this only works if the sprites are below a “Resources” folder. If not, it seems to work opposite: with Bypass sRGB checked, it looks good in the editor and bad when you hit play, with Bypass unchecked it looks bad in the editor and good on play. If sprites are in resources folder, checked => good both in editor and in play, uncheck => bad on both.