Picture controls: brightness, colour and fit

Most films need nothing. When one is too dark, oddly coloured, stretched or sideways, the fix is in AIX Player’s picture settings. Brightness, contrast, picture fit, zoom, rotation, deband and deinterlace are free; the finer colour tools and the presets are part of AIX Pro.

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Windows 11 & 10 · AIX Player 3.0.16.0 · Reviewed 28 October 2026

Free in every copy

• Brightness and contrast, the two everyday adjustments.
• Picture fit: auto, 16:9, 4:3, fill or stretch, plus zoom for a picture with black bars built in. Fix a stretched picture or black bars.
• Rotation and flip: 90, 180 or 270 degrees, or a horizontal or vertical flip, for footage filmed sideways.
• Deband smooths out colour banding in gradients such as skies and dark walls.
• Deinterlace, automatic by default, for recordings made of interlaced fields, such as older TV recordings and DVDs.
• The free HDR Tone-Mapping switch in More → Video settings defaults to off, retaining automatic mapping; on selects the chosen curve. Tone mapping fits HDR to an ordinary display so highlights and shadows keep their detail.

HDR video has its own free allowance: 180 playing minutes once per install, then unlimited with AIX Pro. How the HDR trial works.

The AIX Pro picture tools

• Saturation, how vivid the colours are.
• Gamma, which lifts or lowers the mid-tones while leaving true black alone: the better fix for a dark scene than brightness.
• Hue, which shifts every colour, for a transfer with a colour cast.
• HDR tone-mapping strength, how strongly HDR is mapped onto an SDR display.
• Video modes, ready-made presets: Standard, Cinema, Lively, Bright room, Dark room, Animation, Outdoor sports and Video games, plus Custom.

Each one is labelled Pro in the app, and all of them come with AIX Pro.

Where to find them

Use Settings → Video for picture defaults, or More → Video settings during playback; Zoom, Crop / aspect-fill and HDR Tone-Mapping are in the player panel. Crop / aspect-fill changes the playback aspect-ratio override; it does not trim pixels or provide a freeform crop. Use Zoom or Picture fit → Fill to enlarge past built-in bars. When the picture is zoomed, Shift and the arrow keys move it, and R resets zoom, pan and aspect.

Which control for which problem

• Too dark in a lit room: brightness, or gamma (AIX Pro) to bring out shadow detail without turning black grey.
• Stretched or squashed: picture fit.
• Black bars on every side: zoom.
• Steps in a smooth sky or a dark wall: deband.
• Comb-like lines on moving edges: deinterlace.
• Filmed sideways on a phone: rotation.

Most films need none of this. Picture adjustments worth making explains when to leave the picture alone.

Picture-in-picture

To keep a film playing while you work, picture-in-picture floats it in a small window above your other apps.

Picture adjustments, picture fit and Rotation / flip apply across videos until you change or reset them; they are not saved separately for each file.