How do you change brightness, color and sharpness from command line?

If the driver of your graphics card supports it, then you can use xrandr.

The following command lists the current configuration:

xrandr --current --verbose

If you want to change the configuration of an output, then you need the name of the output. This name is part of the output of xrandr --current, for example LVDS1.

The brightness can be changed like this:

xrandr --output <outputname> --brightness 0.8

Gamma (red:green:blue):

xrandr --output <outputname> --gamma 0.5:1.0:1.0

xrandr will not increase the screen brightness on the hardware level (the one that is changed by the laptop display brightness keys). As the xrandr manual says:

--brightness brightness

Multiply the gamma values on the crtc currently attached to the output to specified floating value. Useful for overly bright or overly dim outputs. However, this is a software only modification, if your hardware has support to actually change the brightness, you will probably prefer to use xbacklight.

Instead, use xbacklight to change the brightness:

xbacklight -get #get the current level
xbacklight -set *percent* #set brightness to a given percentage
xbacklight -inc *percent* #increase by a given percentage
xbacklight -dec *percent* #decrease by a given percentage

However, since this is same as using the laptop brightness keys, this cannot go beyond the limits of 0-100%. If you wish to brighten/darken your screen further than that limit, you can use xrandr to force software brightness levels:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 0.5

Note that xrandr accepts fractions (0.0-1.0) while xbacklight accepts percentages(0-100)

For laptops, I just learned from man xrandr:

   --brightness brightness
          Multiply  the gamma values on the crtc currently attached to the
          output to specified floating value. Useful for overly bright  or
          overly  dim outputs.  However, this is a software only modifica‐
          tion, if your  hardware  has  support  to  actually  change  the
          brightness, you will probably prefer to use xbacklight.

So I tried

xbacklight -get
xbacklight -set 70

and it works!