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lowering display brightness using software
- Thread starter zoran
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Shades, Midnight, Dimmer Than Dim, Brightness, ScreenDimmer, Work at Night and probably other screen dimming applications can hep.
Of those two I only used Shades (which frelled up my Mac somehow) and Midnight, and Midnight was more than okay compared to Shades.
what do you mean by "frelled up"? and in what way was Midnight more than ok compared to shades?
Frell
I could not properly control my iMac's brightness after installing Shades, keyboard shortcuts were not working and some other stuff I do not remember anymore.
Midnight did not do that and just worked.
hah ok regarding frell
regarding shades just installed it and not using shortcuts seems ok to me so far!
Sorry for a necro bump but these threads always come up on Google very prominently and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably where most users (like me) are coming from when landing on threads like this and it's very useful to help each other out with one's findings on the web like so.
I think I've now tried every, or almost every, Mac dimming app out there (at least every one that appears worth trying, based on its advertising). There appear to be (from what I've observed, at least) three ways to dim a Mac (say a Macbook) screen:
1. Hardware: LED backlight method - advantage: saves power (I think? actually, going by what this person reports, it might use MORE power to dim the screen, very interesting!). disadvantage: when activated (i.e. anything other than full LED brightness setting), the dimmer circuitry is activated and apparently gives out quite a bit of EMF, or at least enough for people concerned with EMF levels issues (like me), to ideally prefer software dimming over hardware. (and to add weight to this general claim for LED dimming hardware, see this answer from the same above-linked SE discussion.)
(what's very interesting is that if all the above is really true, then software dimming is ALL-OUT superior to hardware dimming, and Apple should be doing the latter by default in the system instead of led dimming!!!)
2. Software: system color profile / gamma preset changing method (e.g., Shades) - from my experience it can be very poorly done with ugly 'blackness' which is actually a very garbled thick dark grey with visuals not very clear at all - at least in the case of Shades, from my testing. Maybe it can be done better, and just better color profiling could be done than Shades does.) (Disadvantage: it interferes with OTHER screen color profiling apps you may want to use at the same time, like the famous f.lux, which itself works via color profile changing. I tried using Shades with f.lux and it flickered between the two apps' screen states they were both trying to apply to OS X at the same time, lol. It was an epileptic nightmare.)
3. Software: 'overlay' semi-transparent graphics method (e.g. Shady, or here's another example of the method albeit not exactly normal screen dimming in that case) - this appears to be a much higher quality non-LED dimming method, at least if Shady is anything to go by. It's fantastic quality super-low dimming! Plus the advantage is you can flawlessly use it with specialised color profile changing apps like f.lux at the same time.
But (my) problem with Shady is it has no hotkey provision for brightness up/down (like you would for the hardware LED backlight itself)...
And there's a few other great candidates (all overlay-style with quality dimming) which all also don't have hotkeys built into them, at least as of now:
- ScreenDimmer (already mentioned)
- Screen Shade
- Work at Night (also aforementioned) (confusingly, these last two are identical and the the dev seems to have them as essentially 'dupe' apps of his on the Mac App store, very poor form and what's more, they even hint that they have hotkeys for the dimming but I tried it and it's not, it only has shortcuts for toggling off/on the dim overlay, and for quitting the app!
SO:
The ONLY one, (and it's not perfect, sadly, but it still is the best, with my specific criteria outlined above of it working with f.lux and not dimming the hardware LED and working with full screen apps and having a quality enough dim AND, crucially, being hotkeyable), I have satisfactorily-enough arrived at, is:
ScreenShade
From its humble little presence on the web, it looks the lowest quality / most unlikely candidate for the job - no developer website, and most shockingly of all, latest update on softonic says '03/06/08'!!!
But it remarkably does the job, with no hitches, now in 2014 - has a quality preferences window, has a good dim, and even has moderately configurable multi-monitor customisation - check it out yourself...the ONLY thing it leaves to be desired, is that the hotkeys jump the slider on the scale a bit less granularly than you ideally want - the jumps are slightly too big, and half their amount would be wonderful - but it ain't bad, and it'll do for me since no other app ticks all the (bigger) boxes in my case! It still goes down to super low, and is nice (enough) an overlay in terms of clarity - so it'll do for me.
So I hope my research has helped uncover a little gem, whoever developed the thing, and here's hoping it'll continue to work just as it does well into Yosemite and beyond! But at least, I listed the other 'close candidates' (all just without hotkeys) and they at least offer some hope of being updated in future (especially ScreenDimmer, who has the nicest-seeming dev, or Screen Shade / Work at Night, if we're lucky - as for the fantastic Shady, it has been officially abandoned (though open-sourced) by its Scottish developer and it appears to only have a dumb clone on the Mac App Store by a dev with a dodgy virus injecting-looking web site), if ScreenShade proves to fail in the test of time!
I think I've now tried every, or almost every, Mac dimming app out there (at least every one that appears worth trying, based on its advertising). There appear to be (from what I've observed, at least) three ways to dim a Mac (say a Macbook) screen:
1. Hardware: LED backlight method - advantage: saves power (I think? actually, going by what this person reports, it might use MORE power to dim the screen, very interesting!). disadvantage: when activated (i.e. anything other than full LED brightness setting), the dimmer circuitry is activated and apparently gives out quite a bit of EMF, or at least enough for people concerned with EMF levels issues (like me), to ideally prefer software dimming over hardware. (and to add weight to this general claim for LED dimming hardware, see this answer from the same above-linked SE discussion.)
(what's very interesting is that if all the above is really true, then software dimming is ALL-OUT superior to hardware dimming, and Apple should be doing the latter by default in the system instead of led dimming!!!)
2. Software: system color profile / gamma preset changing method (e.g., Shades) - from my experience it can be very poorly done with ugly 'blackness' which is actually a very garbled thick dark grey with visuals not very clear at all - at least in the case of Shades, from my testing. Maybe it can be done better, and just better color profiling could be done than Shades does.) (Disadvantage: it interferes with OTHER screen color profiling apps you may want to use at the same time, like the famous f.lux, which itself works via color profile changing. I tried using Shades with f.lux and it flickered between the two apps' screen states they were both trying to apply to OS X at the same time, lol. It was an epileptic nightmare.)
3. Software: 'overlay' semi-transparent graphics method (e.g. Shady, or here's another example of the method albeit not exactly normal screen dimming in that case) - this appears to be a much higher quality non-LED dimming method, at least if Shady is anything to go by. It's fantastic quality super-low dimming! Plus the advantage is you can flawlessly use it with specialised color profile changing apps like f.lux at the same time.
But (my) problem with Shady is it has no hotkey provision for brightness up/down (like you would for the hardware LED backlight itself)...
And there's a few other great candidates (all overlay-style with quality dimming) which all also don't have hotkeys built into them, at least as of now:
- ScreenDimmer (already mentioned)
- Screen Shade
- Work at Night (also aforementioned) (confusingly, these last two are identical and the the dev seems to have them as essentially 'dupe' apps of his on the Mac App store, very poor form and what's more, they even hint that they have hotkeys for the dimming but I tried it and it's not, it only has shortcuts for toggling off/on the dim overlay, and for quitting the app!
SO:
The ONLY one, (and it's not perfect, sadly, but it still is the best, with my specific criteria outlined above of it working with f.lux and not dimming the hardware LED and working with full screen apps and having a quality enough dim AND, crucially, being hotkeyable), I have satisfactorily-enough arrived at, is:
ScreenShade
From its humble little presence on the web, it looks the lowest quality / most unlikely candidate for the job - no developer website, and most shockingly of all, latest update on softonic says '03/06/08'!!!
But it remarkably does the job, with no hitches, now in 2014 - has a quality preferences window, has a good dim, and even has moderately configurable multi-monitor customisation - check it out yourself...the ONLY thing it leaves to be desired, is that the hotkeys jump the slider on the scale a bit less granularly than you ideally want - the jumps are slightly too big, and half their amount would be wonderful - but it ain't bad, and it'll do for me since no other app ticks all the (bigger) boxes in my case! It still goes down to super low, and is nice (enough) an overlay in terms of clarity - so it'll do for me.
So I hope my research has helped uncover a little gem, whoever developed the thing, and here's hoping it'll continue to work just as it does well into Yosemite and beyond! But at least, I listed the other 'close candidates' (all just without hotkeys) and they at least offer some hope of being updated in future (especially ScreenDimmer, who has the nicest-seeming dev, or Screen Shade / Work at Night, if we're lucky - as for the fantastic Shady, it has been officially abandoned (though open-sourced) by its Scottish developer and it appears to only have a dumb clone on the Mac App Store by a dev with a dodgy virus injecting-looking web site), if ScreenShade proves to fail in the test of time!