Change the brightness or contrast of a video

This page describes how to adjust brightness and contrast.

Other "how to" pages

The VLC media player permits adjustments to a currently playing video. You can tweak the brightness, contrast, and hue (and other settings) in real-time. To preserve the effects, save the video as it plays. This way, the rendering alterations can be applied permanently. This example discusses altering brightness and contrast of a video. But other effects can easily be applied as well.

If you are using the wxwindows userinterface

You can adjust the typical values to tweak the picture of your video source by turning on the extended GUI. This is done in the menu: Settings->Extended GUI. That will give you some extended control options for the video picture as well as an equalizer for the audio. Before it actual works though, you have to enable the filters under the preferences->video

If you are using Mac OS X or a skinned version of VLC

1. From the Window menu, select the "Video Filters" option. (You can also use Command-E.)
2. The Video Effects control box will show up so check the "Image Adjust" box and adjust Contrast or Brightness to desired level.

Changing a video's brightness permanently

Here's a step by step approach. We'll use the VLM Control to choose video input and output files. We'll also use the Extended GUI option to create our effects. We'll even handle a bug that crops up when VLC reads/writes files.

Setup for broadcast.

1. Choose View / VLM Control... from the menu.
2. Type something in the Name box.
3. Choose an Input file by browsing to the video you want to change. Location may be an issue, so place it where the directory path is fairly short, e.g. "C:\temp" on a Windows box. When you hit Choose the Open... File dialog appears.
4. Run the transformation (may require to expand the window to show controls)
5. If output file does not maintain the changes try toggling the video overlay setting (CTRL-S - Video)

This page is part of the informal VLC Support Guide.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.