Color Basics
So here is a primer for color.
Before I get into this, I would like to point out, if you are an artist, designer, movie editor, compositor just starting out, this info should be ignored, and you should find the exact info that this is trying to simply explain. Also, get your monitor color corrected, and keep it so.
For the rest of you, color correction allows you to set you monitor to look the same as professionals use to create exact matches for colors, in places were it makes a difference, such as movies, photos, magazines, tv shows, games, you get the picture. This is going for accuracy, and is going the opposite direction than the opp asked for, but I leave this in for others coming to this subject.
Color is what?
Every single color your screen can display is made of three base colors red, blue and green. This is how 99% of displays work, and how ALL Mac displays work.
So the controls that OSX gives you are working on those three colors. Meaning, if you are not careful, you could end up with an overly green, red, or blue display.
By default, OSX wants you to change all of colors at the same time, to prevent you from messing up. You can still override that behavior, at least for the time being.
Brightness is the control to set how blown out something looks. This is not the same brightness that is on the keyboard, which is just turning up the amount of light put out by the display. As your brightness goes up, you will notice that you will start to see parts of the image that you couldn't see before. But, as you continue, the display starts to "blow out" mimicking what you might see when looking directly toward the sun on the snow. You want a value that is somewhere in between those, where you can see the most detail.
Contrast is something entirely different. In simple terms, contrast is the separation between the colors. (This is not strictly true, but is an easy way to think of it.) As you decrease contrast, the colors become muddier, grayer, and detail is harder to make out. Conversely, as contrast is increased, the colors becomes crisper, but start changing to no longer see as much detai either, this time because your display can't display the full range of color being sent. You want something in between this.
Gamma is a long discussion about how our eyes work, versus how computer store, process, and display color information. To skip through some of that, most displays are manufactured to display semi accurately at a Gamma of 2.2. So this is fine for most displays. The test that displays the grey lines that you must adjust is changing the gamma. Unless you really know what you are doing, simply follow the instructions for this setting.
But wait, don't televisions have things like saturation and tint?
Yes, but now we are really talking about the individual colors. Saturation is basically a line between how red or blue something is. And Tint is the same for red and green. (Yes, I know these are approximations, but they work for these purposes.
What about vivid mode, and movie mode?
This takes us into the home theater arena, but basically, televisions are sold on showroom floors, in really bright light. Vivid mode is basically a marketing mode for store owners to use, when you have so much light pouring onto the screen that a correctly calibrated television would look murky and dark. It was never intended for home use, yet consumers use it, not realizing its true purpose. These usually increase the brightness, the contrast, and the blue and red aspects of the screen, though this last is dependent on the manufacturer.
Movie mode is intended to be viewed in a DARK room, where your eyes have adjusted to the darkness for around 30 mins. This mode is meant to be an easy setup for a theater experience. You can start looking into home theater topics to find out more about this particular mode, though you could go the color correction route, which is basically the same thing.
Gaming mode is more complex, because more is going on than it might seem, depending on the television. More expensive monitors have a feature to turn off any video processing they do to a video signal in gaming mode, to help increase the response time of FPS games. Which could mean that you are seeing the screen with no settings having any affect, or a partial set of settings working, but with little clue which those are.
So, I don't know which mode in particular you are going for.
Sorry this is so long winded, but hope this helps.
Dragorth
