Use Opera’s lucid mode feature to enhance online videos with subtle sharpness and color.
High-definition video has led us away from videos that don’t offer the same detail. Opera’s Lucid Mode is a browser feature that seeks to enhance videos and images with a single click. This article will show you how to activate lucid mode and see if reality supports Opera’s claim.
What is lucid mode?
Lucid mode is a video enhancement feature in Opera. As stated, it claims to improve the quality of online videos and images by increasing sharpness and clarity. Lucid mode works on all online videos from eg YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
It’s not a magic button; instead, it uses hardware acceleration from your PC’s GPU and an under-the-hood CSS sharpening filter.
Video enhancement is disabled by default, but you can enable it in three ways.
Enabling (and disabling) Opera Lucid mode
It’s easy to enable and disable Lucid mode with the three methods provided by Opera. You can set it to work on all online videos or enable it for individual videos with the third option (the Lucid Mode button overlay).
- Select the easy setup (to open the sidebar) > Lucid mode > Lever Enhance videos on all sites I Sharpen images on all sites.
- Enter opera://settings/lucidMode in the address bar to display the Lucid Mode options.
- Play a video and select the lucid mode button overlay to enhance video or turn it off.
Note: The Lucid mode overlay button does not appear in a full screen YouTube video.
Does lucid mode help?
As the official video from Opera shows, Lucid mode makes those old YouTube videos look better by increasing the sharpness and brightness. As long as the online video is blurry, you will get some mileage. You also don’t have to rely on the many online video enhancers and software to enjoy casual videos. But it’s still an early iteration that can’t always give you the best results. In our tests, there were several hits and misses. Therefore, the best option would be to hit the lucid mode button overlay on selective videos instead of focusing videos and images on all sites.