Fixing VLC and NVidia color profile

If you have an NVidia card, I recommend you to change a setting on your Nvidia control panel as soon as possible.  I was often using VLC to play back movies and was puzzled why the black were pictured as dark grays.

The picture on the left is greyer and the picture on the right has better contrast. The explanation is that the color palette on our generation of video cards are based on 4 color components ranging from 0 to 255. No every screen is able to reproduce the entire color spectrum so it was a normal practice to limit the range to values between 16 and 235. So instead of having a darkest color with a value of 0 (which gives black), you end up having a darkest color with a value of 16 which is dark grey.

You can easily fix this yourself, just go into Windows Control Panel, and click Appearance and Personalization

Click Nvidia Control Panel

Click Adjust Video Color Settings

Click on Advanced

Click on Limited (16-235) next to the Dynamic Range

Change it to Full (0-255)

Click Apply and your done..

You should see a difference if you use a software like VLC. Some software seem to bypass the NVidia control panel and they doesn’t have this issue.