How in the Tech

Automatically Adjust Monitor Brightness by Time of Day

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 27, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Windows

Do you spend all day staring into that pixelated simulation of real life, otherwise known as a monitor? I do and it can reek havoc on your eyes – especially late at night. Computer monitors emit light at a constant brightness, regardless of your surrounding environment. We appreciate a nice bright screen on a sunny summer day but as the sun retreats into the sky and darkness creeps in, suddenly that bright monitor is, quite simply, too bright. Using a computer late at night with no other lights on in a room can be quite painful without adjusting your brightness. Does this sound like a problem you just tolerate?

F.lux is a free utility that can adjust the brightness and tint of your monitor based on the time of the day. In the evenings the monitor can dim and the tint can be adjusted to the type of lighting in your environment, automatically. To get an idea of what exactly F.lux is capable up you can execute a time-lapsed preview of the effect through the software itself. The transition will appear rather abrupt in the condensed demo but in actual use it is rather smooth and not overly jarring.

There are a few applications out there that do something similar but F.lux is unique in that it actually changes the color temperature of the display, not just the brightness. Natural light has more of a blue tint while most artificial light is of a warmer, often red, nature. Using these two principles, F.lux adjusts the glow of the screen. Furthermore, scientific studies suggest that the natural blue light is beneficial during the day but that same light at night can lead to insomnia. Why are heavy computer users typically thought of as night owls? Maybe this is the answer.

F.lux is one application that you may not realize you really needed until you take a few minutes to check it out yourself. It’s free and available for Windows, OS X, and even Linux.