How to dim the screen even more?

Working with MacBook Air in the dark is quite comfortable in one hand and uncomfortable in another hand. It has a nicely built backlit keyboard which let Mac newbie like me to find the keys easily. However, the LCD screen is too bright in the low light condition, even in the lowest brightness setting.

The MacBook Air has brightness controls to dim the screen in the dark, but quite often it is not satisfactory. The granularity of the control is so coarse that even the minimum brightness setting is still quite bright when in darkness. So, is there any fixes?

In Windows, one can change the settings of the display driver as well as that of the LCD screen, manipulating the brightness and contrast. In Mac, the display driver doesn't have that options, changing the gamma doesn't help. The only built-in help is to reverse the screen color by this key combination:
control + option + command + 8

Reversed screen color does make the screen less bright in some case as the among of bright color pixels are normally in larger portion. It has a side effect that the color change as well which is quite undesirable.

Thanks to the freeware called Shades, it totally solves the issue. It installs a system preference panel and the application runs in the background. It seems to work like overlaying a semi-transparent black layer over the screen. The transparency is adjustable which creates an effect of dimming the screen pixels. It works brilliantly well and is highly recommended if you need to work in the dark like me!


A screenshot of the settings of Shades