Picture adjustments worth making

Most films need nothing. A few need one small change — and knowing which is which saves you from ruining the rest.

When to leave it alone

A film has been graded by someone whose job that was. If it looks right, it is right. Reach for the controls when something is genuinely wrong for your room or your screen, not as a matter of habit.

The adjustments that earn their place

Brightness for a scene too dark to follow in a lit room. Aspect ratio for older footage carrying the wrong flag, so the picture stops looking stretched. Rotation for phone clips filmed sideways. Zoom and crop to fill the screen when a film is letterboxed inside its own frame.

They stay with the file

Whatever you set is remembered against that film, so a fix applied once does not need repeating — and nothing is written back to the original.

Zoom, crop and aspect are three different things

They get confused constantly. Aspect ratio tells the player what shape the picture should be — the fix when a film looks stretched or squashed. Zoom scales the whole picture up, filling the screen and pushing the edges beyond it. Crop trims the frame, which is what removes black bars baked into a film. Reaching for zoom when the aspect is wrong makes the distortion bigger rather than fixing it.

Brightness versus gamma

For a scene too dark to follow, gamma is usually the better control. Brightness lifts everything equally, including the blacks, which turns them grey and makes the picture look washed out. Gamma lifts the middle of the range while leaving true black alone, so shadow detail appears without the image losing its depth. A small gamma adjustment beats a large brightness one nearly every time. Brightness and contrast are free; gamma, saturation, hue, sharpness and the picture presets are part of Pro.

Everything is remembered, and nothing is permanent

Adjustments save against the individual file, so a badly transferred film stays corrected next time you open it while everything else is untouched. Nothing is written back to the video itself — the original is never modified — and a single reset returns any file to how it arrived.

Worth knowing