Opera browser wants to make old videos look sharper with its Lucid Mode

[harlan4096]

Opera browser has a new feature called Lucid Mode. It makes old videos look slightly better, by sharpening them.



Lucid mode in Opera browser

The problem with most old videos are the resolution they were shot in, the lower it gets, the blurrier the image looks. Opera aims to address this by adding a CSS sharpening filter to videos and images on web pages. This feature is driven by hardware acceleration, handled by your computer's GPU.

The option is disabled by default, you can toggle it in 3 different ways. Open the sidebar and toggle Sharpen videos on all sites, and optionally enable the 2nd setting, Sharpen images on all sites. You may also configure these options from the browser's settings page: opera://settings/lucidMode



The third way to toggle it is by simply opening a web page that has a video, when you click the play button, a button labeled "Lucid Mode off" will appear, click on it to
switch it on, or off.

When I read about it at the announcement page, and saw the ad for it, I thought this is just a gimmick. My expectations weren't high, but I wanted to see how Lucid mode works. Some videos appear to have a grainy effect, this was noticeable in videos that had a very low resolution.



In videos that had a decent amount of detail, the results appeared marginally better. If you observe the images carefully, you may notice that various objects in the background and foreground appear slightly sharper in Lucid Mode.



The filters are similar to shader effects like HQ4x, xBRZ, ScaleFX, that you may have used in game emulators. There is still a bit of noise here and there in videos with Lucid mode enabled, but you can't do much about it. The feature appears to make some changes to the brightness and a color correction effect to sharpen the image quality.
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