How to Fix Fake 4K Quality on YouTube
On YouTube, bloggers upload videos that look low-quality, specifically blurry. This is often surprising, and it's unclear how 4K quality can be so blurry. Typically, such quality should demonstrate a lot of detail, like skin texture. YouTube values high-resolution videos, so many bloggers have an incentive to make them high-quality. It might seem like bloggers are deceiving YouTube by passing off low quality as high quality, but often that's not the case. They apply blurring and adjust the contrast. They distort skin color as if there's paint on it.
Blurring
This effect is good due to its simplicity. It's too primitive to cause many problems during setup. But its primitiveness plays into the hands of those who want to reverse it. When blurring is used, it's often just a slight distortion that can be partially reversed. In fact, a lot of texture information remains, but it's simply hard to see. You can use your own filter to improve video quality.
For example, you can use sharpening to partially correct the blur.
Using the Page Context extension, you can add sharpening to a page element to make details visible. Sharpening has a simple formula, but it still has parameters, so you might not have enough sharpness with one set of parameters. The extension can apply sharpening for two sets of parameters simultaneously.
I recommend using one set for Distance 1, and a second set of parameters for Distance 4. You will see that the effects from these sets are different. The greater the difference in Distance between the sets, the less similarity in the effects. Each of these effects can, in its own way, remove blurring.
Low Contrast
It's a bit more complicated here. Contrast can also be partially restored, but when restoring contrast, you might sacrifice brightness, making the entire image darker. You can also degrade the image by creating out-of-range brightness values. Contrast restoration works well on videos if the changes in contrast and lighting are not significant, because after significant changes, new settings need to be created. But this isn't always a problem either, since bloggers might have favorite filter settings for reducing contrast, and they may not change the lighting.
To restore contrast, you can use the following tools in the Page Context extension:
- Brightness amplitude
- Brightness exponent
- Contrast
- Saturate
Usually, for this, you need to increase Brightness amplitude and Brightness exponent, and decrease Contrast and Saturate.
The result on many videos will be such that you will see the familiar 4K quality you're used to.
The Page Context extension allows you to bind these settings to page information, which means, for example, for YouTube, you can bind the settings to a channel. To do this, you need to go to the Radar using the back arrow from the effect settings and in its rules, select an element with the key $[*].author.url in the rule template hints.