Freeware of the week: Shades (Mac)

Better brightness control for your Mac

As computer displays become brighter and larger, most controls for setting brightness levels remain crude. Apple’s latest displays, for example, are still very bright even at the minimum brightness setting. For designers and others spending hours in front of a computer, the inevitable consequences are sore eyes and headaches. Charcoal Design promises to solve this problem with their app, Shades.

Shades works by covering your entire screen content with a highly adjustable overlay. Consequently, you have very fine control over your display’s brightness. As one would expect, the app’s brightness slider and the cursor remain at full intensity. This makes them really easy to spot, but is sometimes annoying.

You can adjust brightness from a menu-bar item, a hover-window, or through keyboard-shortcuts. One drawback is the app’s inability to automatically hide itself when you’re making screenshots. You can work around this by temporarily increasing the brightness before taking a screenshot.

Download Shades.