How to Adjust Your TV Settings for Darker Scenes
Too many people had to tune their TVs to watch the last Sunday episode of Game of Thrones . In fact, there were so many articles on Monday morning about all the settings you should try to crank up – brightness, contrast, gamma, picture modes, backlighting, etc. – that now you probably have a completely different picture on your TV. than before. The Battle of Winterfell requires many; The picture quality of your TV is no exception.
I hope you saved your settings before you started messing with everything. If not, we have a guide to getting a great picture after you reset your TV to its defaults (so of course you can start from scratch).
However, it is also helpful to know a little about what you have been tweaking (or planning to adjust for revisiting). As fun as changing random settings on your TV is until you see a black undead zombie wearing all-black armor running around a dark castle at night, it’s important to understand what these settings actually do to the image. You want your TV to look its best, and it’s important to know how its settings interact to create the perfect picture.
Brightness
Brightness is a funny concept, mainly because of how it is measured – nit. A nit is equal to about 1 candela per square meter (often abbreviated to simply “cd / m2”) or the relative brightness of a single candle. Keep this in mind for your next Jeopardy performance ! …
I also like the way CNET’s Jeffrey Morrison put it:
“This amount of light per square meter is one thread. Or, in other words, imagine a 16-inch (40.8 cm) box on each side, with a candle in the middle. The total amount of light falling on the inside of the box is 1 nit. “
By adjusting the brightness of your TV, you adjust the “absolute black” level. In other words, you are playing with how “dark” the darkest parts of your image are. Increase that and you get more gray instead of true black, but not necessarily with more detail and probably a more washed out image. If you rotate it down, you can start to lose subtle details in darker parts of the image (for example, a slightly black shirt against a blacker jacket against a dark wall).
As an example, here’s how my monitor looks at normal (~ 48) brightness, and when it is pushed all the way up (100) and all the way down (0). Note what the different brightness levels do with the grayscale:
Standard * brightness
* I usually set my monitor’s brightness level to 48 (out of 100) based on previous calibration.
Maximum brightness
Hello blurry picture. Also note that you might not get a ton of extra detail in darker scenes, but you can probably turn up your TV’s brightness a little if you need a little extra help for darker TV shows or movies.
Minimum brightness
Simply no. Look at all the details you are missing throughout the gradient.
Contrast
Adjusting your TV’s contrast does not necessarily change the difference between light and dark areas, as described by John L. Jacobi of TechHive in a 2017 article. Instead, you simply change the TV’s perception of absolute white – similar to what you did when you messed up the brightness setting.
This is why brightness and contrast settings go hand in hand when calibrating a display. (This is also the reason why you’ll want to adjust the brightness, adjust the contrast, and then go back and check the brightness to make sure that little interaction gives you the most detail you can squeeze out of your TV or monitor.)
As before, this is how these settings look in the real world:
Standard * contrast
* I usually set my monitor’s contrast level to 70 (out of 100) based on previous calibration.
Maximum contrast
There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between this and the 70s. However, you can see a little more detail in the darkest shades of gray, but you blur the whites a little again.
Less contrast
Just for comparison, this is what the contrast looks like when I set it to 35, as setting it to the lowest value doesn’t show much, as you’ll see shortly.
Minimum contrast
Great for Batman, not very good for … watching anything. You don’t see anything, Jon Snow.
Backlight
Adjusting your TV’s “backlight” setting, if any, also affects its brightness. In fact, your TV manufacturer may even use the term “backlight” in their settings menu to refer to what is usually a “brightness” control, or vice versa, as Alex of Gizmodo previously described .
In an ideal world, dimmers affect the black level of your TV, and dimmers affect the brightness of your TV’s LEDs. If you’re still puzzling over what your TV’s backlight plays with all of this, Linus Sebastian has an excellent (albeit older) tutorial:
Generally speaking, if you liked the look of your TV (or went through somecalibrationtests to make sure you get as much detail as your TV can beep), you should probably just mess up the backlight setting if you want a little extra detail. in darker scenes. Once you’re done, bring it back to where it was when you originally “refined” your TV settings.
Here’s a quick rundown of how the settings look in practice using a darker scene from Interstellar on my side-lit TCL LED TV.
Lowest backlight
This is what this beautiful space scene from Interstellar looks like when my TV backlight is set to 0.
Medium backlight
Same picture, but I set the backlight to 50.
Highest backlight
The highlight is now set to its maximum value: 100. As you will see, you get a little more detail in the darker points, but you also loosen up the white areas – a big fight.
Gamma
I’ve looked at monitors for years and still can’t think of a great way to describe “gamma”. Here is one of my favorite descriptions, again courtesy of CNET’s Jeffrey Morrison :
“If you adjust the gamma on your TV, it will change the perceived grayness of blacks, shadows, midtones and, to a lesser extent, even highlights. Gamma describes the transition of an image from black to white and affects all shades of gray in between.
A high gamma, that is, a significant curve, means that a wider range of shadows will be darker. This can darken and contrast the image, and hide shadow details. This is the reason why televiews often pay attention to shadow detail. Low gamma has a shallower curve, so shadows will appear brighter. This can make the image look washed out and flat. “
If it helps to illustrate this, an old article from HDTVtest helps to clarify things a bit. This is how the same image looks with three different gamma settings:
Low gamma (~ 1.5):
Normal gamma (~ 2.2):
High gamma (~ 3.0):
Clear? My TV doesn’t even have a gamma setting to adjust, so there you go, I have to stick to brightness and backlighting rather than raising the gamma to deal with any TV shows and movies too dark to watch.
I feel like most people are fine if they set their TVs to the traditional 2.2 gamma , but it is not uncommon to go up to 2.4 gamma – if you don’t mind losing some of the shadow detail, which may not matter if you are. ” I have installed your television in your cave of dark geeks.
Your TV may also have a small slider that allows you to set gamma to negative or positive values. I would just leave it at the default unless otherwise noted, but tinkering with it is an option if you really need to enhance the image for your viewing conditions. I found this to be just one of the more frustrating options if you got it wrong.
All the rest
There are tons of other settings you can play with to improve the picture on your TV. Each TV has its own set of settings, so it is difficult to give specific advice. Instead, I would focus on trying to make your image as “clean” as possible, which means turning off all the crap your TV is trying to add to the image to “make it better,” like thathorrible motion interpolation , “ sports ”Or“ game ”modes (unless you really are dealing with a huge lag problem),“ dynamic ”settings on your TV (which can cause all sorts of annoying fades between darker and lighter scenes), and so on.
To get suggestions for your specific TV, I like to look into the calibration settings on RTings.com, which can usually be found in their reviews for your TV. You can also browse avsforum to see if anyone has any suggestions for your setup – or at least to give you an idea of the settings you should definitely turn on or off.
Above all, however, patience is your best weapon. If you’re streaming brand new episodes of a dimly lit show from the internet (Game of Thrones coughs, coughs) , darker scenes are likely to look pixelated and shitty due to the compression . Contrary to what is said operator director “Game of Thrones” Fabian Wagner, it’s not your fault. I mean, it’s not 100% your fault if you did the bare minimum so that the picture on your TV doesn’t suck. This should at least calm you down until the more eye-catching Blu-ray from the mentioned dimly lit episode comes along.