How To Change Contrast, Hue, Saturation on Your Laptop’s Display

If you spend a lot of time at your laptop you know how important display settings are. Get them wrong and your eyes and brain are bound to quickly become weary. In addition, display settings are crucial if you do video/photo editing, computer graphics, or prepare files for printing.

This is why it’s important to zero in on the contrast, hue, and saturation that fit your needs. Any laptop you get comes with display settings or profiles that allow you to quickly make the necessary tweaks. The methods are a bit different on PCs and Macs, though. The following sections provide a quick guide for each operating system.

Windows

First of all, you should know that contrast, saturation, and hue are controlled by the graphics card. This means you need to access the graphics card to make the changes. To reach the settings menu, you usually need to launch the Intel Graphics Control Panel, NVIDIA Control Panel, or AMD Control Center. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1

Right-click on an empty space on your screen and select the onboard graphics card option. Some laptops may have two graphics cards, but only the onboard one has the display settings you are looking for. For the purposes of this article, we’ve used an Intel onboard graphics, but you might have a different one on your machine.

Step 2

Once inside the Control Panel/Center, select Display, navigate to Color Settings, and click to enter the menu.

If you are using an external display with your laptop make sure to choose Built-in Display under Select Display. Otherwise, the changes will affect the other monitor, not your laptop’s display.

You can now move the brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation sliders left or right to make the changes. Click Apply when you’re done. You can also select Save Profile to keep the settings for future use.

Things to Remember

Some laptops or better say graphics cards, allow you to change contrast, hue, and saturation for specific colors. For example, Intel graphics in this write-up lets you make individual changes to green, red, or blue. However, this option might not be available on older hardware.

You can always restore to default if you mess up the settings. There should be a button or an option to restore to default with one click. For most users, the default display settings are just fine. However, your display might look off even after you change hue, saturation, and contrast. In this case, you might need to reset the display color profile.

Different graphics cards may have different verbiage for the menus, but you always navigate to display and color-related settings.

macOS

Since Macs are primarily designed for graphics and video manipulation there are more than a few ways to adjust contrast, hue, and saturation. In addition, the system features ready-made color profiles and you can make your own with some help of a built-in wizard.

Change Contrast Only

Tap or click on System Preferences and select Accessibility, then choose Display in the menu on the left.

Move the slider next to Display contrast to increase it. You can also make some quick, albeit pretty radical, display changes by ticking one of the options above Display contrast.

Display Profiles

As said, macOS features a bunch of color preset profiles that affect the overall hue, saturation, and contrast of the display. To access the menu, select Displays from System Preferences and choose the Color tab.

Tap or click one of the profiles and you’ll immediately be able to see the changes on your display. If you select Open Profile, ColorSync Utility pops up to let you preview all the values for that profile.

Custom Calibration

Clicking on Calibrate takes you to the macOS display setup wizard. This way you can create a ColorSync profile that matches your needs to the T. You should know that the settings take some time to adjust and they go beyond just hue, saturation, and contrast.

This option allows you to determine native luminescence curve of your display, select curve gamma response, and get the right white point (cool or warm). If these terms are not familiar to you, chances are you don’t need a custom calibration.

These advanced display settings are dedicated to professional designers and videographers/photographers. They allow for custom display adjustments that match a specific printer/plotter or video log.

When Color Isn’t Bright, Display Settings Make It Right

Whichever operating system you use, it’s not hard to adjust saturation, hue, or contrast. That said, most contemporary laptops come with sensors that optimize the display settings for your environment automatically.

But if you plan to add an external display to your setup some tweaks might be necessary to match the colors on both screens. You can do it using the methods in this article, just make sure to choose the correct display.