After spending a small fortune buying the latest technology televisions or projectors, we calibrate them and hope their image quality is even. This is what normally happens when we play content such as demos, trailers, certain video games and movie sequences, or series designed to impress us.

But then things change in everyday use with a lot of general real-world content. While there are movies and TV shows with amazing picture quality, there are others that offer some. shadows are too dark or vice versa washed blacks and grayish colors and everything went dark.

Is it the fault of our configuration? Generally no. they are satisfied this is how they come from the origin, often with the argument that it’s the “creator’s intention” and we should respect that. However, sometimes such content hard to enjoy and above all a very uncomfortable experience.

Colorless and blackened films

A scene from Game of Thrones

In many cases you will have met very dark serials this makes it difficult to follow the action on the screen. It is a very useful resource in the editing process. set colorimetry the entire tape or just hide cheap special effects so they go unnoticed any more.

Many movies and TV shows have become increasingly gray and dull in recent years. A grayish sheen covers everything, muting the colors and sometimes under the guise of being a monster, giving it an overall dark appearance that reduces the visual impact. old tapeOf course, there were no colors in the world centuries ago, or because the filmmaker wanted to convey a certain “emotion” to the audience at certain times or throughout the shoot.

“The Arrival” series

We have a clear example in Denis Villeneuve’s “The Arrival”, where it was decided to give the film’s photography such a special twist. turn off colors and limit brightness and contrast, to put it nicely. This feels like a movie from decades ago where dark scenes were hard to enjoy. There are even a few like the helicopter ride where you can’t really see what’s going on.

In horror movies It is a more common condition. It’s all so dark that you don’t really know what’s going on, where the villain is, or what’s going on around the characters. It’s the perfect excuse to hide special effects and cheap settings and give “tension” to a scene that would be hard to follow without the soundtrack’s sound shocks.

The series “Alien vs. Predator: Requiem”

The paradigm of hiding low-budget effects in this way can be found in “Alien Vs Predator: Requiem,” which I once saw, or rather sensed, on Blu-ray. Beyond the plot, most of the footage it was almost impossible to tell what was going on because it was so dark. Figuring out which insect ate which character was more intuitive than anything else.

The problem becomes even more complicated when you want to enjoy such scenes in a single frame. room in broad daylightor with some ambient light at night. Whatever you do, if you want to know a little bit about what’s going on, it will be a nearly impossible task.

“Game of Thrones” Episode 8×03

Another legendary example was the key scene of the popular movie. The series “Game of Thrones” this sparked a lot of controversy at the time. It doesn’t matter if you have a big, epic battle with lots of competitors, then if you can’t watch it at the end because it’s completely dark and has compression issues due to streaming.

raised blacks

But blackout isn’t the only problem seen in many movies and TV shows. It’s also common to see what it’s called. “raised blacks”an expression that refers to an expression extreme brightness increase origin resulting in an emotion image faded or faded.

It’s like we put a veil in front of the camera, a kind of filter on the image. destroys the depth of blacks and reduces the color palette, providing a deep and unobtrusive ash touch.

It feels like we forgot to remove the protective plastic on the screen and so everything is seen from one screen without contrast or brightness. non-existent blacks We can see this quickly in night scenes or late credits, especially if the movie is recorded in panoramic format with black top and bottom bands.

A scene from the movie “Queen’s Gambit”

Movies like the aforementioned “The Arrival” or more modern series like “The Lady’s Gambit” or “The Curse of Bly Manor” show this effect many times over, which is even found in commercials, programs and documentaries on DTT, this time I’m due to some bugs in the transmission configuration. Let’s assume it’s because.

Scene “The Curse of Bly Mansion”

In these situations, it’s normal to see things with that weirdness. grayish appearance which does not provide detail in dark areas as we exceed the visible range of different image formats.

In fact, considering we’re probably going to watch it on stream or via DTT, instead of improving the image quality imperfections such as compression artifacts and graininess are more prominent especially in shaded areas, with weak gradients and purple-gray tones where we need to have very dark blacks and grays more than desirable.

“Batman”

And it is not a fault of the old content. This is something we can see in the recently released movie “The Batman”. dark image, too dark with washed-out blacks during almost all filming and, paradoxically, at many moments.

Y no matter what TV technology we haveWhether it’s an advanced model with a modest LCD, miniLED and FALD, a very expensive projector or a high-end OLED television, the flaw will still be there, luckily there is a better solution in this case. The problem is more when there is a very dark image.

Can’t all this be solved at home?

Unfortunately, in most cases these darkening imperfections, faded colors and raised blacks are not an issue with our TV’s configuration, but rather this is how it comes from the origina streaming broadcast or in such a distributed physical form.

There is little we can do if the image is almost completely dark, but we can try this if the imperfections are not too serious. change our display settings As we saw in his day to alleviate the problem.

We can try adjusting its parameters for this. brightness, contrast, gamma curve, saturation of colors and even the backlight of the TVEven if you don’t expect miracles.