How to get ambient light on YouTube
A short guide. Updated October 13, 2026.
Ambient light is the soft glow that spills out from the edges of a video, so the screen feels bigger and the room feels lit by what you are watching. YouTube has a small version of this built in, and you can get a much stronger, adjustable version with a free browser extension.
Option 1: turn on YouTube's built-in ambient mode
- Switch YouTube to the dark theme: click your profile picture, then Appearance, then Dark theme.
- Open any video and click the gear icon (Settings) in the player.
- Turn on Ambient mode.
The built-in mode adds a faint, fixed glow behind the player. It only works in the dark theme, and you cannot change how bright, wide or soft it is.
Option 2: a bigger, adjustable glow with Lumora
Lumora is a free Chrome extension that draws a live glow around YouTube videos from the colors of the picture itself. It works in the default view, theater mode and fullscreen.
- Install Lumora from the Chrome Web Store.
- Open any YouTube video. The glow fades in on its own.
- Click the Lumora icon to adjust intensity, softness, reach, color and smoothness, or press Alt + Shift + L to turn it off and on.
Built-in ambient mode vs Lumora
| YouTube ambient mode | Lumora | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free on YouTube |
| Glow size and brightness | Fixed, subtle | Adjustable, up to a large glow |
| Works in light theme | No | Yes |
| Theater mode and fullscreen | Partly | Yes |
| Keeps black bars out of the glow | No | Yes |
| Other video sites | No | Yes, with Lumora Pro |
Tips for the best glow
- Use theater mode (press T). The glow has more room to spread above and below the player.
- Watch in a dim room. Ambient light looks best when the screen is the main light source.
- Slower laptop? In Lumora's Glow tab, set the frame rate to 24 for smoother playback.
- Letterboxed films: Lumora detects black bars and keeps them out of the light, so the glow matches the actual picture.
Why some streaming sites stay dark
Services that use DRM copy protection block extensions from reading their video frames, so no ambient light extension can draw a glow on them. This is a limit of those sites, not of your computer.