What is openeffects?

OpenEffects is a Linux application that adds camera effects to your webcam, similar to what Apple's Center Stage or video conferencing apps provide on other platforms. It works on Wayland desktops and integrates with the PipeWire audio and video system, so any application that accepts a camera input (Zoom, OBS, web browsers for video calls, and so on) can use the processed video output without any changes to those apps. The available effects include background blur that keeps edges smooth and stable over time, automatic face and body tracking that crops the frame to keep you centered as you move (called Center Stage), background replacement with a solid color or a custom image, a subtle lighting adjustment that brightens your face relative to the background, and hand-gesture-triggered animated overlays like confetti or emoji bursts. The gesture reactions are turned off by default. The project has three components that work together. A background service called the daemon handles the actual video processing using the GPU. A graphical settings app lets you toggle effects on and off, adjust their strength, and manage background images. A command-line tool gives you text-based control over all the same settings, which is useful for keyboard shortcuts or status bars in tiling window managers like Hyprland or Sway. The machine learning models that power the effects run locally on your machine with no data sent to any server. The software detects what GPU hardware you have and uses the best available acceleration method, falling back through a priority list from NVIDIA and AMD GPUs down to a CPU-only mode. On weaker hardware it automatically lowers effect quality to keep video lag below 50 milliseconds. Installation packages are available for Arch Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The project is written in Rust and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It currently requires an x86_64 processor and only supports Wayland, not the older X11 display system.