Calibration
A picture tuned to your screen.
Tell Unplugged what your projector or TV can actually do — measured white, measured black and peak brightness — then apply a calibration LUT as the final polish.
Three numbers, set once
Your display target is not a look. It is a description of the screen: where white sits, how bright the peak is, and how dark black actually goes. Set it from a measurement and leave it. Every tone curve and every source is mapped into it.
| SDR display nits | 25–400, default 80. The measured SDR white of your display. A TV in a bright room is typically 100–200; a projector in a dark room 40–80. The AVSForum reference comparison used 120 nits. |
|---|---|
| Static nits (max) | 10–1000, default 1000. Your display's measured peak white in SDR mode — the destination the tone curve maps to. |
| Display black | 0–2, default 0. Your measured black level. OLED at true black stays 0; a projector measuring 0.3 gets 0.3, so shadow detail is not spent on a level the panel cannot show. |
Why the numbers matter
Declared below your measurement, SDR white makes the picture run bright and the highlights pay: the shoulder clips sooner and sky detail goes first. Declared above it, films render dark with headroom unused.
Brightness without lying about the panel is what Exposure is for. It works before the curve, in thirds of a stop, so the shoulder absorbs it instead of clipping. The display numbers stay measurements.
Calibration is the final polish
A DisplayCAL .cube loads into the app and is applied after tone mapping and grading. That ordering matters: the LUT corrects what the panel does to the picture, not what the film asked the panel to do.
- Separate from the tone curve. Change the source, the curve or the grade and the panel correction still applies.
- An enable toggle, not an unload. A/B the LUT without losing the loaded file.
- One display per LUT. Moving the PC to another panel means another measurement.
Colour that fits your screen
Colours can look garish not when they exceed the display gamut but when they sit exactly on its edge — the maximum for their lightness. Gamut capacity (709) lands each colour at a fraction of its own distance to the edge: 1.00 is off; 0.55 is the breathing room measured reference software leaves a deep-blue sky.
Pale colours have long distances and stay untouched at any setting, so this cannot desaturate a whole film. It only relaxes colours crowded against the edge.
Smooth away the steps
HDR tone mapping down to an 8-bit SDR signal creates steps in slow gradients: sky fades, dark walls, the bloom around a lamp. Deband flattens each band edge and covers the work with fine grain.
| Deband | On by default. Turn it off only if you want to keep the grain exactly as encoded. |
|---|---|
| Threshold | 0–256, default 32. How small a gradient step is treated. |
| Range | 1–64, default 16. How wide an area is blended per band. |
| Iterations | 1–4, default 1. Two is usually the honest maximum. |
| Grain | 0–128, default 24. The noise that hides the blending; matching real film grain is the target. |
Adaptive sharpen is the other finishing pass: it measures each edge against its local neighbourhood and limits itself, so it adds detail without white halos. It is off by default because clean 4K rarely needs it.
How to measure
- Measure the panel. Use a colorimeter and DisplayCAL, in the display mode you actually watch in.
- Enter the three numbers. SDR white, peak white and black go into the Display Target section once. Do not re-enter them per film.
- Export a .cube. Load it in the calibration row; the LUT is applied as the final pass.
- A/B it. Use the enable toggle on a scene you know. If the LUT is doing its job, the difference should be in the panel's error, not in the film's look.
Measure once. Watch everything.
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