How to keep color changes / corrections of all GeoTIFF files during merge with gdal or in QGIS?

Question

I am trying to merge two GeoTIFF files in QGIS or w/ gdal, but when I merge them I lose the color changes / corrections I made to the second GeoTIFF.

Is there any way to keep the color changes I made to the GeoTIFFs after merge?

I clipped a region of the first GeoTIFF that needed color correction and then made the color changes, then when I merge them back together I lose the changes.

I have tried using QGIS merge tool as well as gdal_merge.py & gdal warp to achieve the desired result, but always the same issue is present.

The clipped color corrected raster is last in the merge order, so I am sure it is being merged over the top of the original.

Any ideas?

Original:

Clipped & color corrected:

Both together, clipped on top:

After merge

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Here's a link to download the files I am working on.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=17wyRKbkDE1twWBSMDsY2upY7cuoHmOq1

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Here is a similar question, but I don't understand how I could apply the answer to this question to my issue....

QGIS: Is it possible to merge two stacked raster layers keeping color rendering and transparency?

Answer 1

I sorted this out. forgive my lack of technical terminology. Looks like the color changes were not written to the tiff file permanently. I did "save as" then used the "rendered image" option. Then I did the merge function, setting the clipped color corrected raster as the second layer in the sequence. This gave the desired result.