title: More about gamma than I ever wanted to know link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/more-about-gamma-than-i-ever-wanted-to-know/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 543 created: 2008/04/06 02:24:14 created_gmt: 2008/04/06 02:24:14 comment_status: open post_name: more-about-gamma-than-i-ever-wanted-to-know status: publish post_type: post

More about gamma than I ever wanted to know

As my never-ending struggle with the Dell 1905FP monitor, NVIDIA and Red Hat Linux continues, I’ve come to learn more about _gamma_that I ever wanted to know. Thus the title to this brief entry.

Gamma (more fully, “gamma correction”), as we all know (well, as I found out a short while ago), “is the name of a nonlinear operation used to code and decode luminance or tristimulus values in video or still image systems” (Gamma correction in Wikipedia). As a practical matter what that means is that it’s a way to correct for variations in the brightness and ratios of red, blue and green in an electronically displayed image caused by differences in display hardware. In my case the display was way too bright and contrast way too low, which not only made the whole display look “washed out”, but actually became harder to look at after a couple of hours working on it. The solution was to fire up the display card’s configuration tool and find a gamma setting that would make things bearable again.

Fortunately NVIDIA includes a pretty nice gui tool, nvidia-settings with their driver for Linux that allows you to set the gamma.

Where the factor default gamma for my card was, naturally, “1.00”, I found that backing it down to 0.604 did the trick. To make sure this setting is automatically loaded in each session I then went into the Gnome System… Preferences … More Preferences … Sessions menu and clicked on the Startup Programs tab, where I then clicked add and entered the following:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only

That’s all it took.

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