I’ve been doing my best to search around but haven’t found a good answer. The OS has a gamma setting for outputting to the monitor, and so I’m a little confused by the in-game gamma settings, do these override the system gamma setting, or are they additive to it in some way?
I particularly ask because everything I see says 2.2 is the setting that we should generally aim for in gaming, but when I set it to 2.2 it is very washed out.
As a visual example, on this page about gamma do a search for “What is Gamma? | BenQ US” in google and go to the site by that name. I was TRYING to post a link, but apparantly I can’t, despite playing this game for more than 10 years and never posting a bad link… /sigh
When I set WOW to 2.2, it looks more like the left image on Figure 3 (that says it is the Gamma 1.0). What confuses me more, is that the in game gamma settings seems to be doing the opposite or what Gamma should do, because those images on Figure 3 are switched compared to how WOW seems to handle Gamma values on my machine. Lower is darker for me, unlike what that example shows.
So should I set the value to 1 to just let the OS gamma be the deciding factor, or is there another default I should use for daytime use?
Colorspaces, and how all the various layers of things that can mess with them, are an absolute nightmare to fully explain.
I think that 1 in WoW is equal to the default Windows 2.2 and I think the slider acts like a multiplier from there. I’d assume WoW’s gamma slider is just a post-processing filter and that it lets the displayed image be handled by the Windows color profiles. Their slider is definitely backwards though. Going lower should “wash” the image out and going higher should make things “darker.” My guess is that they probably implemented it this way because your average user thinks of it like how a brightness slider would work: lower=darker, higher=brighter.
I’d leave WoW on 1 if you want to see the image as it’s supposed to be(assuming your Windows color profile and monitor profiles are default 2.2 profiles). Especially if you use a modern monitor, since most of them are wide gamut DCI-P3 (anything that does HDR usually uses this color space) that also assume 2.2 gamma.