In music there is the very well established practice of placing compressors on audio signals that have too much jarring dynamics from quiet to loud and tend to hurt our ears and not feel aesthetically pleasant. However in the realm of human sight while there is flux and other screen blue light eliminators/eye comfort filters and a decent amount of dark mode support for a lot of software and webpages/browsers… it seems strange to me that I have never found a eye comfort plugin for a computer or phone that attempts to massage abrupt extremes as well as abrupt discontinuous changes in a wholistic measure of a display’s light intensity output.

What I am describing would look like is when you opened a new tab from a relatively grey/dark mode dominated display picture in your web browser and the webpage that loaded was all white that instead of being a massive abrupt blast of white to your eyes the “light intensity compressor” would limit how fast the overall brightness of the picture could change and slow the speed down to a pleasant gradual change that ended up presenting the actual very bright display image only after working your eyes up to it. The light intensity compressor could also be a limiter and simply not passthrough overall brightness values over a certain amplitude.

Note I am not asking for “apply dark mode” everywhere tools I am asking if any tools exist that can sit at the end of the image display pipeline and moderate dynamics so that sudden brightness changes were simply not displayed.

I realize this isn’t really a directly a science question but since it involves somewhat complicated signal analysis and manipulation concepts I figured science was a better place for it.

If none of these tools exist is there a hard reason they couldn’t?

  • supersquirrelOPEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    For the former, limiting how fast brightness can change would effectively be the same as a poor pixel response time. This tends to manifest as image ghosting past a certain point and is usually seen as pretty undesirable given it means you lose a lot of detail around anything in motion

    I am well aware there would be distortion, I would turn the compressor off when viewing dynamic content.

    • mvirts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      It wouldn’t have to treat each pixel independently, and could handle dynamic content while still compressing time changes in the overall brightness. I think there would need to be some special handling of max brightness vs average brightness over time. A nonlinear relationship between Max and average brightness (gamma maaaybe?) could help

    • Cort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      There isn’t really a way to change pixel response time outside of buying a new (crappy) monitor.

      Plus that could result in more bright pixels staying bright for longer

      As for the blue-ness reduction, many monitors come with an “eye care” setting that drops the max brightness and reduces blue tint. The LG C5 I got a couple months ago has it and might be the closest thing you can get prepackaged. It being OLED doesn’t help with bright flashes though, probably makes them worse by comparison.