http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Color_on_iPhone
So I wonder why some games appear a lot darker on the iphone compared with in the Editor. (e.g. TunnelRunner) I thought it was because of the iphone gamma, but according to the above article, maybe not!
Could it maybe have something to do with the intensity setting of the screen light?
I mean i have a default medium brightness setting, i already wondered if one could alter that somehow (from within unity).
When one turns off auto-brightness and cranks up brightness to the max in the iPhone settings it looks really nice (though probably it drains the battery way quicker then 
), would be nice to be able to set auto-brightness off and the brightness to a certain value from within the app for the case the user set it to an unfitting low/high value that makes the game look not as intended (and then be able to react on application quit so one sets it back to how it was before on exit out of the game).
That would not be a good idea…under no circumstances do you want to override what the user has the brightness set to. Could be that the user wants to save battery life, play in bed when the spouse is trying to sleep, whatever, and would be justifiably very annoyed by a game trying to mess with this, even if it was possible. One’s artistic sensibilities are always subservient to what the user wants, I’m afraid.
–Eric
Yeah, one could maybe read the value of the setting and if the user set it all high or low bring up a dialog box saying: "hey, your brightness setting seems to be too low/high, this game is optimized for [setting xy]
Would you like to change this?
Yes, change brightness
No, continue with active setting
Even if the var was read-only one could bring up a message saying something similar, then the user would have to quit out of the app if he wants to change it.
“feature request” ahem unity maybe we should have color ‘profiles’ for each device we are targeting. In my case iphone only.
But Unity does not create your art assets, it just imports them. Is it Unity’s job to be dictating color profiles in art assets? (honest question)
If you read the article above, there is a link to a color profile for iPhone, that you could load up into Photoshop for or whatever you are creating textures with.
What happens to the color profiles when Unity converts to PVRTC compressed format, or when Xcode copies a PNG, I sure don’t know.
I don’t have time to try this out but if anyone gets anywhere with this, by all means post it. It’s an interesting puzzle.
Also I don’t think iphone brightness setting is the cause of this. It’s more the saturation and darkness of the colors displayed on the iphone.
Have you tried changing your brightnss setting and tried the game then? When i set it to a higher brightness setting the look of the game is totally like in unity.
OK thanks. Maybe it’s as simple as that. I generally run at 50% with auto-brightness. To conserve battery
yeah,me,too, that just sadly of course makes the game look less shiny.
We’ve looked into this issue in the past. That was mainly in the context of making a decent preview of a windows-based game - but it’s the same problem: display the game for a different device than what you’re developing on.
Sadly, we were unable to find a way to do this for a single OpenGL view on the screen. (Photoshop does it in software, so they can get away with that just fine).
What I’ve ended up doing is to have different color profiles and then switch my main display to whatever I’m developing for. Not supernice (actually writing code with a monitor calibrated to “shitty ancient flatpanel PC” is a pain) - but it solves the problem.
So I’d say: Configure your mac screen to be superdark and dull, then make your game shine
Yeah, good suggestion, but would be really handy if one can at least read the brightness setting´s value so one could based on that make the lights etc in the game brighter or not. Is it possible/ planned to get read access to the brightness setting?
you can not and never will
User settings are accessable only to the user. You at best can read them but not alter them, for good reasons actually.
You could bet that I would report any app to apple as malicious that even thinks about touching my personal user settings on the phone by any meanings.
If I wanted to burn my battery, I wouldn’t have set the screen to a pretty low value.
As i said, its perfectly understandable and fine if the Brightness setting can´t be or shouldn´t be altered.
But being able to just read the value one could react to it, for example set the intensity of scene lights etc higher.
Right now the problem is that with a medium brightness setting on the iphone the scene is overall much darker than in unity on the desktop screen. But when i then “blindly” just make the lights etc brighter to look good on the iPhone on a certain setting that may then make it way too bright etc if the user has his brightness set to a higher value than i esitmated (just as it may still be not bright enough if he set it to an even lower value than what i estimated). So yeah, would like to read the value so i can adjust the game propperly.
All, you can download the color profile from the article above, copy it into /Users/YOU/Library/ColorSync/Profiles.
Then go into System Preferences | Displays | set your main display to use the iPhone color profile. Et voila - it looks DARKER (at least on my monitor it looks darker). There are surely other subtleties only an artist could pick out. Now if you make your game look good on that display, it should look good on the iphone. I believe this is what Nicholas was advising above. 
@tommosaur, I just searched for “brightness” in the iPhone Dev Center and it does not look like the device’s brightness is in the iPhone SDK at all. Meaning- it’s just not possible to get it or set it.
But consider that the brightness setting of a particular device and the gamma and/or color profile of these devices, are two different issues!!
Desktop monitors have hundreds of manufacturers and separate settings for brightness and contrast and warmth etc. That’s crazy to try to make your game look good everywhere.
The iphone devices are all identical, except for the brightness slider. And out of the box it is set to auto adjust brightness. That uniformity is pretty awesome from an eye-candy point of view. It should be pretty straightforward to get your game looking nice and bright on the majority of iphone and ipods. That is assuming the user isn’t a trogolodyte who keeps it on like 20% brightness all the time. Nothing you can do about that.
yeah, and thanks for the info
RenderSettings.gamma feature would be nice - you could then allow the user to set the brightness within the app if it appeared to dark.
This setting would be in software in the app only - nothing to do with the user settings on the device.
Like, RenderSettings.ambientLight for example.
Possible?
From a development point of view it makes sense to design your graphics for an iPhone set to medium brightness. I kept mine on full bright all the time, as it is usually plugged into the USB when I am working… consequently my app looked too dark on most other people’s devices.