The Mac has buttons that allow you to adjust the brightness of the screen. If you press it a few times, the screen will go black. But what if the least bright setting is still too bright?
Dim Mac screen
When you work in the dark, it is not always pleasant to look at a bright screen. By adjusting the brightness in combination with the buttons ‘Shift + Alt’ you can reduce the steps so that the image can be slightly darker than normal. But it doesn’t make much difference and perhaps the second darkest position of the image is still too light for you, what do you do? There is a solution in the form of Shady.
Shady has been around for a while; it is a free app for the Mac that allows you to dim the display further than standard. This comes in handy when you are at work at night, when your eyes are tired or when you simply cannot stand a bright screen. If you have a MacBook connected to a separate monitor, you usually cannot even control the exposure via the keyboard. Even then Shady is useful. The app is not in the App Store for Mac, but can be downloaded from the website of maker Instinctive Code. It is available for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.
After downloading Shade, you can open the program. You will immediately notice that the screen becomes less bright. In the Mac menu at the top of the screen, there is a Shade icon (a dark square with a light bar at the bottom) that allows you to set how dark the image should be. You simply indicate this with a slider.
What does Shade actually do?
The app doesn’t really darken the screen. What happens is that Shady overlays a gray image on the Mac screen. Depending on how dark you want it to be, the image becomes darker gray. That also means that if you take a screenshot, it will be very dark. The colors are therefore not entirely correct, although you will not notice that in the dark.
Flux
Another option for using your Mac in a dark environment is to install Flux. This program does not darken your display, but creates a warmer look instead of the blue light that the Mac normally shines. Flux’s yellow glow is said to be better for your eyes and not mess up your night’s sleep. The iPhone gets the same function in iOS 9.3, about that read more here.
Do you want to know how to dim the screen of the iPhone further than seems possible? Then read this tip.