Want Night Shift For Your Mac or PC? Here’s How to Keep the Blue Light Away

By Jamie Pham  |  January 21, 2017 | 1:30pm
Tech News
Want Night Shift For Your Mac or PC? Here’s How to Keep the Blue Light Away

Staring at a computer screen throughout the day is not great for you especially in the evenings. Screens emit blue light mimicking the sun so your brain may stop producing melatonin at night causing you to stay up later than usual. This could cause long term health risks such as stress and depression due to lack of sleep.

Apple released a feature last year on iOS devices called Night Shift aiming to cut back on eye strain and sleeplessness but they have not announced anything similar for desktop devices.

This infographic from Business Insider does a pretty good job of summing up the issue:

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While some people may not want to give up their screen time at night, there is a solution to minimize the laptop’s blue light emission in a third party app called f.lux. How do you get it to work? It’s not easy as it would be if Apple would introduce the feature directly into macOS, but getting f.lux is pretty straightforward.

Go to their website and download the program. It’s available for every platform you can imagine—so you should be good whether you use Mac, Windows, or even Linux.

Once you do that, you can set your schedule for when it comes on (custom time or sunset), desired light temperature, transition speed, and that’s it. There’s a bunch of different settings to mess with, so make sure to play around with it until you’re happy with the colors.

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You can disable it at anytime in case you want to watch movie or set rules so it doesn’t run when you have certain apps open like Photoshop. Overall, it’s a great way to get that Night Shift effect on your desktop or laptop, which is highly recommended if you are an all-day computer user. Until Apple brings Night Shift to macOS officially, f.lux is your best bet.

 
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