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What this is

A colour panel for your whole screen. Five sliders — brightness, contrast, gamma, temperature and night vision — are compiled into a gamma ramp and written straight to the display adapter. Everything the panel shows goes through it: games, video, the desktop, all of it.

It is not a game mod. Nothing is copied into a game folder, no process is opened, no library is injected and no driver is installed. The ramp is the same knob a monitor calibration profile turns, which is why it needs no administrator rights and costs exactly zero frame time — the correction happens in the display pipeline, not in your game.

The panel

Left rail holds the presets; the thumbnails are not screenshots but the same scene pushed through each preset's actual curve, so what you see on the card is what the preset does. Centre column is the three control cards. Under them sits a live preview with a draggable before/after split — you set the sliders there and watch the result before it reaches the screen. Hold to compare drops the effect for as long as the mouse is down.

Right rail saves profiles and draws the transfer curve — what each input level becomes on screen, against the diagonal of a display left alone. It is one line while the channels agree and splits into red, green and blue once temperature pulls them apart, redrawn as you drag. Under it, two figures say what the engine is doing: how much of your setting Windows let through, and on how many displays. The screenshot above shows the first of them earning its place — Windows turned Night Vision down to 85%, and the panel says so in amber rather than pretending.

A window shorter than 760 pixels drops the live preview and the source-code card, so the controls, presets and profiles still fit down to the 680-pixel minimum.

Controls

Control	Range	Neutral	What it does
Brightness	−0.35 … +0.35	0.00	Shifts the whole curve up or down
Contrast	0.60 … 1.80	1.00	Opens the gap between shadow and highlight, pivoting on mid grey
Gamma	0.50 … 2.20	1.00	Reweights the midtones while both ends stay pinned
Temperature	−1.00 … +1.00	0.00	Warm or cool, by separating red from blue
Night vision	0.00 … 1.00	0.00	Lifts shadow detail out of the black without washing out highlights

Every slider carries a tick at its neutral position, and every value box is editable — type 1.35, press Enter, done.

Sliders take the keyboard too: ← → move by a hundredth of the range, Home and End pin the ends. The mouse wheel moves them in the same steps, and a double-click puts one back on its neutral tick. Each slider ends exactly where the engine clamps, so there is no stretch of track at either end that the value snaps back from.

The key next to Auto-apply in the status bar is the global shortcut, because that toggle is what it flips.

Saturation and hue are deliberately absent. A gamma ramp is one curve per channel and cannot mix channels, so no honest implementation of them exists on this path. Shipping dead sliders would be worse than leaving them out.

How it works

Each of the 256 input levels is pushed through the five stages in a fixed order:

night vision → gamma → contrast → brightness → temperature

The result is a 256-entry table per channel, handed to SetDeviceGammaRamp on every display you selected. The maths lives in src/color.rs and is held down by unit tests: the neutral setting must reproduce the identity ramp exactly, every curve must stay monotonic, contrast must pivot on mid grey, gamma must leave black and white untouched, and night vision must lift shadows at least ten times more than highlights.

cargo test

When Windows says no

Windows rejects gamma ramps that stray too far from linear unless GdiIcmGammaRange is widened, and that registry switch needs administrator rights and a sign-out. Rather than fail, the engine walks the setting down — 100%, 85%, 70% and so on — until the driver accepts one, then tells you in the status bar exactly how much of your setting survived.

Gamma ramps also outlive the process that set them. The engine reads and stores the ramp of every display at startup and puts it back on exit, and the restore also runs if the window is closed to the tray or the effect is toggled off. If a previous run died before it could restore, the ramp it left behind is recognised at the next start — it matches the saved settings — and cleared instead of being mistaken for the original.

When something else resets it

A game entering exclusive fullscreen, a panel waking from sleep and a resolution change all put the display's ramp back to whatever Windows thinks it should be. The engine reads each display's ramp once a second and writes the effect again when it has been replaced, so it comes back on its own.

If the ramp keeps getting replaced — five times in twenty seconds — something is fighting for the display: another colour tool, or a game that drives its own brightness through the ramp. The engine steps aside for that display rather than flicker against it, and the status bar says so. Changing any setting takes it back.

Install

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Built and tested on Windows 11; the two calls it depends on, GetDeviceGammaRamp and SetDeviceGammaRamp, have been in Windows since 2000, so 10 works as far as the driver allows it.

With Scoop, which also keeps it updated:

scoop bucket add tlk https://github.com/Talkdedsec/scoop-tlk
scoop install tlk/tlk-visual

Or download talkdedsec-visual.exe from Releases and run it. One file, no installer, no .NET, no WebView2, no runtime of any kind. Windows SmartScreen will warn you the first time because the binary is not code-signed yet; verify the checksum below before choosing More info → Run anyway.

Settings, profiles, the displays you left out and the last slider positions live in one file, written within a second of any change:

%APPDATA%\Talkdedsec\Visual\config.json

Delete it and the program starts fresh. Set TALKDEDSEC_VISUAL_CONFIG to a path of your own and it becomes portable. Nothing else is written anywhere, and nothing is sent anywhere — the program opens no sockets.

Verify the download

The release workflow builds the binary on a clean GitHub runner and attaches talkdedsec-visual.exe.sha256 next to it, so the digest below is the one you can reproduce from the tag.

SHA-256 for talkdedsec-visual.exe, release v0.2.0:

3c8d157281093a52c03caee9cfcfa36a466057d6280392ea305f8b8ef8841c7f

Get-FileHash .\talkdedsec-visual.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Living in the tray

Closing the window sends it to the tray rather than quitting, so the effect stays on while you play. The tray menu shows the window again, toggles the effect, or quits for real. If you would rather the close button actually close, turn the option off in settings.

A global hotkey — F6 through F12, F9 by default — toggles the effect without leaving the game. If another program already owns that key the panel says so instead of failing silently.

Run at startup is a single registry value under HKCU\...\CurrentVersion\Run, added with --tray so it comes up minimised; switching it off removes the value.

Only one copy runs at a time. Starting the program again while it sits in the tray brings the open window forward instead of putting a second icon next to it.

Displays

Settings lists every connected display by the name in its own EDID — LG ULTRAGEAR, DELL U2720Q — with a laptop's own panel shown as Built-in display. Number 1 is the main display. Click one to leave it out: its original ramp goes straight back and the effect stays off it, which is how a second screen or a TV is kept untouched. At least one display always stays selected.

The choice follows the panel rather than the port number Windows hands out, so it survives a reboot. A display plugged in while the program runs is picked up within a second and gets the effect too, unless you left it out before.

Language

The panel, the tray menu and every status message come in English and Turkish. A first run follows the Windows display language; pick one in settings and the window switches on the spot, and the choice is kept in config.json. Both languages are compiled into the executable.

Every control also has a name and a role for screen readers and other UI Automation clients: sliders report their value and range and can be stepped, switches report on or off, and the icon-only buttons say what they do. Esc closes the settings.

Profiles

Name the current slider positions and they are saved. Saving under a name that already exists overwrites it, so repeated saves do not pile up duplicates. The profile that matches the sliders is highlighted, the list scrolls however many you keep, and deleting takes two clicks — the bin turns into Delete? first — so a stray click cannot cost one. Profiles export to plain JSON and import back, which is also how you move them between machines:

[
  {
    "name": "night",
    "settings": {
      "brightness": 0.04,
      "contrast": 1.05,
      "gamma": 1.35,
      "temperature": -0.1,
      "night_vision": 0.85
    }
  }
]

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Talkdedsec/tlk-visual
cd tlk-visual
cargo build --release

Rust 1.85 or newer is the only prerequisite. There is no C++ toolchain step, no Python, no node_modules. The output is target/release/talkdedsec-visual.exe at roughly 9.4 MB.

Path	What is in it
src/color.rs	The transfer curve and its tests
src/i18n.rs	Language choice and the Turkish for text drawn from Rust
src/engine.rs	Displays, gamma ramp I/O, the backoff ladder, the once-a-second watch and restore-on-exit
src/preview.rs	The procedural preview scene
src/presets.rs	Built-in presets
src/profiles.rs	Profile store and JSON import/export
src/system.rs	Global hotkey, run-at-startup, one copy at a time
ui/	Slint interface: main, widgets, icons, theme
lang/	Turkish catalog for the Slint interface, bundled at build time

The preview scene is generated, not photographed: sky gradient, treeline, terrain, a deliberately dark pocket for night vision to work against, and a twelve-patch calibration strip. Nothing in this repository is traced from anyone else's artwork.

Known limits

• Saturation and hue are not possible on a gamma ramp. See above.
• HDR displays ignore gamma ramps on most drivers. Turn HDR off if nothing happens.
• Exclusive fullscreen hands the display pipeline to the game. A title that resets the ramp on entry gets it back within a second; one that keeps rewriting it wins, and the status bar says so. Borderless windowed is the reliable mode.
• The ramp is global. Every window on that display is affected, not just the game.
• Every selected display gets the same ramp. Different settings per display are not possible yet, and mixed panels will not land on the same result — the ramp is a curve, not a calibration.
• Windows clamps the range by default, so extreme settings arrive softened. The status bar tells you when that happened.

A note on games

This changes what the display does with the image, not what the game draws. That is a real distinction, and it is why nothing here touches anti-cheat.

It is not, however, a promise. Some competitive titles disallow external visual settings that improve visibility, and enforcement is their call rather than a technical question. Read the rules of whatever you play and decide for yourself.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later — © 2026 Talkdedsec

Take it, change it, ship it. Derivative work has to stay open too.