Problems with TV not showing good grays in games

So I'm pretty tech-inept, only getting a TV for the first time in over a decade, and have been having problems with it and am hoping some of you might be able to help me out. I've got a flat screen TV, and when playing FF12 on my PS4 I noticed certain areas were really, really dark. I didn't think anything of it - I just assumed it was wonkiness on FF12's part - until I tried playing Darkest Dungeon switch. The mini-map, which is supposed to have gray squares on a black background, was completely washed out in black - I could barely see the minimap at all, and the square outlines were barely visible.

I tried the different pre-set settings on the TV ("vivid", "gaming", etc), and none of them helped. Has anyone run into this kind of problem before and know what sort of adjustments I might need to be looking for?

What brand and model of TV is it?

Is there a receiver involved?

Some games have "gamma" control sliders, so check the game in question first to see if its video setting have a setting.. But THEN as someone said above I would check the video setting on the PS4 and they check how you TV is set up. There could be a compromise between how your TV is set up and how the PC4 is set up that will allow for good looking content on all media.

What model is your TV? A lot of LCDs just aren't great at low-contrast detail, which is the big reason OLED is getting so popular.

If you have access to one of those old dvds with the calibration stuff you can use those to manually adjust your settings. Most tvs dont come out the factory adjusted very well in my experience

@karrius: As said above check for "Black level" value in BOTH your PS4 settings and the TV, they need to match. Set both to "limited" (should work with "auto" as well), if it's not helping try all possible values, but they definetely need to match, otherwise this causes blacks to have a washed out effect.

If it's a newer model I would advise to search for "model nuber calibration" on internet or straight up on youtube, it helped me a lot when I got my new OLED a couple of weeks ago. There are other things to tweak as well, most notably turning on the game mode on your PS4 input, then setting the correct values for everything. Also note if you have an HDR TV you'll need to set everything twice, as the settings are not shared in between the SDR and HDR modes.

I generally recommend avoiding the market wank settings. Just use whatever mode is equivilant to "standard" and tweak the settings. Also as suggested above check for full RGB, which rarely works on TVs because it is designed for screens like monitors which use a slightly less compressed RGB color space. Unless your TV has a setting to handle that full RGB color space its just going to look wrong, sort of like if you try to output HDR to an SDR panel.

Tweak settings like gamma, brightness, contrast/picture in particular. If the PS4 has a browser use it to run through http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ it will tell you what things should look like and what settings to adjust to get it looking right. Then boot up a game and tweak further to your taste.

Turn off any toggleable picture settings, as 99% of them will be altering the image displayed and lose data/cause artifacts. Things like dynamic contrast, etc rarely give you a good, clear picture. Unless you have a pretty high end TV they are almost never going to make things look better. Make sure sharpness is turned just high enough to not look blurry, as that can sometimes cause issues with contrast when thr sharpening filter is too aggressive, or present at all. (and imo just looks trashy. If you want better sharpness some TVs, like higher end Sony 4k displays do have upscaling options that work fairly well and can be adjusted to your desired level of aggressiveness.

Assuming you used a monitor for your PS4 previously, I expect full RGB is a part of the problem, as thats what that color space is designed for use on.

Thanks, I'll check some of these as soon as I can, as well as get the model number, but to reply to some of it: I don't think the PS4 alone is the issue. I noticed that something was WAY off when using my Switch between docked and undocked on Darkest Dungeon (sorry that wasn't clear). Does the switch have these adjustments, too? I don't think I noticed them in the settings. The PS4 also hasn't been used on anything but the TV - I've just made the jump back to console gaming a few months ago - so it hasn't been hooked up to a monitor at any point.