Opera Lucid Mode 2.0 brings refined controls and a comparison slider
About a year ago, I wrote about Lucid Mode in Opera browser. Now, the feature has been enhanced with Lucid Mode 2.0.
In case you are not aware of what it does, Lucid Mode adds a button on top of videos, which you can toggle to enhance the quality of the media. Essentially, it works as a filter that sharpens the image quality. This is particularly useful when you want to watch old videos, TV shows, etc., where the quality of the video can be a dull.
Opera's announcement talks about how Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) affects many people around the world. The medical condition, which was identified by Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal in 1984, is often called Winter Depression, and is related to the amount of daylight that we get. Getting less light might make people irritable, depressed, and generally unhappy.
Opera compares SAD to SDD, which it calls Standard Definition Disorder. That's a bit much in my opinion, as a disorder is actually an illness, not something to throw lightly for the sake of a feature. Anyway, Opera says that many users are depressed by watching poor quality videos, which results in SDD. Well, I suppose if I wanted to relive an old video but found the quality to be unacceptable on a modern display, I guess I would be a little disappointed, but not unhappy.
Opera introduces Lucid Mode 2.0 with improved controls
The point is, Opera says SDD is not a problem if you use the browser's upgraded Lucid Mode. The company claims that Lucid Mode 2.0 delivers better browser performance and battery life.
But it doesn't stop there. In my initial review last year, one of the things that I had mentioned was the lack of controls to adjust the video quality of Lucid Mode. It appears Opera has fixed that problem. You can now adjust the strength of the filter, though it can't be done directly from the toggle that appears over videos. To modify it, click on the Settings button, and then scroll down to the Lucid Mode section.
Drag the dot on the slider to the left to decrease the effect of Lucid Mode, or towards the right to increase the enhancement effect of the video filter. Try it out, if you are not happy with a video's quality, lower the strength of the filter, it may result in a better image.
When you enable Lucid Mode, you will notice a new button that sort of looks like a split-screen button. Clicking it enables the Split Preview feature, a comparison slider that can be moved sideways, which lets you see how the video looks with and without Lucid Mode in real-time. You can optionally disable the Split Preview button from appearing in the pop-up, by turning the feature off from the browser's Settings.
Opera has released two new bright wallpapers to help people with SAD, they are called Sunrise and Sunrise in Motion. You can find them at Opera Wallpapers website. Or, you can head to the wallpapers pages directly (1 and 2) to get them by clicking on the Add to Opera button. You may then enable them from the settings section under the New Tab page. They look pretty good.
Download Opera browser from the official website for Windows, macOS, Linux. The new improvements are available in version 105.0.4970.34 and above.
Do you use Opera's Lucid Mode?
I try to avoid automated processes affect my viewing/listening of media.
Noise reduction is already a plague everywhere, apparently you don’t need to care about audio quality any more because you can just use noise reduction and gating.
Video is no different, the more polluted your signal chain is, the worse (and further away from reality) your result will be. No you don’t need to sharpen and turn up the contrast on everything – a high quality rip of older analogue media is usually “fine” but further digital compression is usually what pushes things into the “hard to watch” category.
There’s a saying in restoration which refers to this, called “polishing a turd” – that is what you are doing with very simple and primitive filters like this, polishing a turd. At the expense of what… client-side processing power?
Unless I am specifically trying to make out minute details in video (which is basically never), I watch youtube videos at 480p, this is because I do not watch things in full screen, and i’m using my PC for lots of things at once, no need for anything higher especially if you have double digit number of youtube tabs open.
Opera is trying to convince you that something is a problem so that they can gleefully sell you a solution, it’s marketing 101.
Ooh! Im waiting for 16k tv which i believe you will be near real time AI upscaling an image enhancement in place of higher bit rates. 16k may sound obsessive but when you think about using a large image at desktop viewing distance it becomes stunning instead.
These modes are always bad, and they only use the videos where it works not the other 99.9% where this mode will look bad.
Opera should stop with these useless features and actually fix the Browser, because it is bad in some places. Also, they should stop thinking about money and partners and let people set their own default search engine and not just partners.
And Opera has to definitely fix their adblocker, it is primitive and basic, improve or remove it, same as Vivaladi, adblocker which wasn’t been touched in a long time either. They think basic adblockers are good I guess, and let’s forget about the other many features uBlock has that are necessary for adbloking like scriptlet injections.
Opera doesn’t even allow complex CSS selectors… probably not pseudo selectors and less the native :has(), so maybe Opera should do something useful instead of ‘improving’ these terrible features nobody really uses?
Complex CSS selectors? Can we not? Have you ever visited sites that use the latest and greatest “web technologies”, they are always obnoxious garbage and zero fun to properly navigate. Many websites could benefit from being less over the top and stop trying to be overly clever with their gimmicks. At the end of the day it just ends up hurting compatibility for the benefit of…? Pretty much nothing.
Ghacks back to normal!? Starting this month there seem to be no more generated articles, only genuine ones from Martin and Ashwin. This is what a lot of visitors will want.
@Martin: Care to elaborate on the state of Ghacks, what are the plans for the future?
I noticed the improvement too. Excellent! I had almost given up on ghacks, but now I’m back.
Hallelujah!