Tiny Tip – Get Rid of Glare on Glasses with Dark Reader

Before I go on other people’s shows that have video, I take extra care to make sure everything looks good. I launch Photo Booth on my Mac and set the camera to the one I’ll be using. I use a Logitech c920 webcam, but to be honest the one built into the LG 5K is just as good. For controlling the Logitech I use the excellent menu bar app Webcam Settings and apply a preset I’ve created to set white balance and exposure and such.

This week, before going on Daily Tech News Show, I was setting up as I’ve just described, but noticed that there was a glare on my glasses. I’m sure you’ve seen this lovely look and perhaps you’ve struggled with it yourself. In my case, the anti-reflective coating was making the glare green, which is a really nice effect.

I tried flipping my Mac from light mode to dark mode in System Preferences and the glare was reduced quite a bit but it wasn’t completely gone. My desktop was dark, Slack turned dark, Discord became very dark but I had Safari open to be able to read the show notes. Safari doesn’t override the web developer’s design and shift the colors, so the Google sheet was still white even though the interface for Safari was dark.

I installed the free extension for Safari called Dark Reader (been around a long time) and enabled it. Google Sheets instantly switched to white text on a dark background and the bright glare on my glasses was completely gone.

If you wear glasses and you’re on video and would like a better look than your eyes being obscured by glare for your co-workers or Zoom-based drinking partners, you might want to give the $4.99 Dark Reader for Safari extension a try.