You can use the shade boost to increase brightness.
Try diabling all the bells and whistles in the gfx-settings.
Also what kind of version are you using? Some fields under speedhacks are disabled/greyed out.... In the normal version I would not expect something like that.
Have you downloaded the program from somewhere else than this webpage (pcsx2.net)?
Also maxing speedhacks that are marked as 'not recommended' doesn't seem to me recommendable. Does the game feel a bit sluggish?
He has the main "Enable speedhacks" box top left unchecked. So that's why the greyed out ones, but it should grey them ALL out... I think.
Also he is using D3D9, change to D3D11.
yeah, everything should be greyed out when speed hacks is disabled. I suggest a clean installation of pcsx2 to figure out what's wrong. you can try the builds from
here.