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?
I don’t see a fundamental reason why this couldn’t exist, because in principle it would be a pretty straightforward thing to implement. It sounds like what you’re asking for is essentially a low-pass filter for the brightness of the entire screen (or, more specifically, a filter for each color channel so that blue can be filtered more than red or green)
I think the largest barrier to making something like that would be graphics APIs, as you’d need to read/buffer the entire screen and then apply the filter to every pixel. It would also probably make videos and motion look weird. But, I don’t see why it couldn’t be done.