Game of Thrones: The settings you need to tweak on TV before watching season 8 episode 3

The picture is dark and full of terrors

Game of Thrones has stunned viewers once again, with the longest and most anticipated episode the world has ever seen.

Or, more accurately, that the world has half-seen. Many of the people watching the episode ran into problems with just how dark it was, which meant they spent much of the time looking at indistinct shapes moving around in the darkness.

(This article has no spoilers and is safe to read even if you've not watched episode three yet. If you have watched it, then it might be too late, though the below tips will probably help for the rest of the series too.)

It's not clear why the makers of the show opted to make everything so (literally) dark. But what is perhaps an artistic choice irritated the many viewers whose TVs were not set up for such dark scenes, and what was presumably intended to be atmospheric was largely invisible.

Thankfully, setting up your TV to watch the show should mean that you get the full effect, being able to peer into that darkness as well as still getting the full blazing brightness of the scenes that weren't quite so dark.

It's recommended that anyone watching Game Of Thrones take these few simple steps on their TV before doing so. But it could be valuable for everyone else, too: TVs often come set up for watching in the stores they were bought from, or with otherwise bad default settings, meaning that the settings are not necessarily optimal for normal watching at home.

The easiest and most obvious thing to do is just to make sure that you're watching in the dark. Shutting the curtains and turning off any nearby lighting will allow you to look a little more easily at the darkness on your screen (and will stop you appearing in the reflection of your mostly dark TV).

Once that's done, the most obvious place to start with your TV is turning up the brightness. That should be found relatively easily, in the settings, and you can push it up as far as is good to your eye.

But be careful with this one: there is such a thing as too much brightness. What you're really doing here is making the blacks more grey, which can lead the whole thing to be washed out and look overly bright. So test it with something light as well as something dark, and ensure that you're getting the best view of both.

It's also important to note on that on many TVs the "backlight" setting will be different to the brightness one, and that as well as turning up how bright the picture is you can push up the amount of light coming through the back of it. There might also be a setting that changes the brightness of the backlight according to the darkness of the room, so see if switching this off and on improves things.

Both brightness and backlight settings will make some difference to the problems people are having with Game Of Thrones, and so it's worth playing with each of them separately.

While you're in your settings, have a look at the other options, too. Televisions nowadays come with a whole variety of different options – differently named according to your manufacturer, and doing different things according to the technology in your TV – so it's best to follow a guide to get the best settings.

To do that, you could buy one of the many Blu Rays – such as this one – that guide you through the process and optimise everything to look as good as possible. You can also buy professional tools to calibrate your television, which are expensive but ensure that everything is set up at its best.

Much easier is to use the variety of different settings that are available online. Searching for the make and model of your television as well as something like "recommended picture settings" should bring up forums

Obviously this is not quite as perfect: things like how light your room is will change the preferences, and even televisions that are ostensibly the same model can have slight variations. But those recommended settings should get you somewhere near where you need to be, and you can adjust according to your preferences after that.

Some of these settings might improve everything, and you could find that everything on your TV now looks better. On other sets, the tweaks that stop Game Of Thrones being too dark could make everything else too bright.

As such, it's worth making a note of where the settings are before and after you adjust them, so that you can revert to what you had before or try going somewhere in the middle.