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. Use Zoom or Picture fit → Fill to enlarge the displayed picture and clip its edges. Every picture setting, free and Pro, is on the picture controls page.

They apply across videos

Picture settings are saved globally; they change playback without modifying the original video.

Picture fit and zoom

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. The Crop / aspect-fill menu changes the playback aspect ratio; use Zoom or Picture fit → Fill to enlarge and clip the displayed picture. 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 and the picture presets are part of Pro.

Everything is remembered, and nothing is permanent

Adjustments apply across videos until you change or reset them. 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