Laptops and even some desktop monitors now have the ability to automatically adjust screen brightness. They try to strike a balance between readability, battery life, and eye strain.
Unfortunately, sometimes the brightest Auto Brightness won’t be bright enough, which is why you’ll want to know how to get your screen’s brightness as high as possible.
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What does “brighter than maximum” mean?
Before we move on, it’s important to clarify what “brighter than maximum” means in this context. We’re not talking about hacking your screen in some way to add more brightness to it. Instead, this is about getting the maximum brightness from your display that it can produce by setting the maximum brightness in an individual place.
When most people ask this question, they want to make their laptop screen brighter than maximum, but in this article we will also look at solutions for desktop screens. and even TV.
Manually slide your brightness to the top
If you are using an external monitor, use the on-screen controls to find the brightness setting. Then push that setting as high as possible or to your desired brightness level. This setting is independent of any software-based brightness settings.
On laptops, you can usually adjust the screen’s brightness by pressing a keyboard combination. Look for the sun icon with the up and down arrows next to it. Usually, you will have to keep fn (function key) while touching one of these keys (such as the F2 key) to brighten or dim the screen.
This functionality is independent of your operating system and is permanently connected to the laptop’s firmware. That means you can always adjust your laptop’s screen brightness with these keys, no matter what software you’re running.
Adjust your OS color and brightness settings
You can control your computer’s brightness manually through the operating system, but only if your monitor supports that. In most cases, this is only true for the built-in laptop display.
For example, on a Windows laptop, you can access Action Center by clicking Network, Sound and Battery icon cluster at the far right of the taskbar, then change the brightness by dragging brightness slider left or right.
On a Mac using macOS, you can do the same by clicking the . icon Control Center icon at the top right of the computer screen. However, when using an external monitor, you will see these sliders grayed out when using an external monitor.
Use Color Management to calibrate your monitor
You should also use the built-in color calibration tools in Windows and macOS to ensure that your monitor is adjusted correctly. It’s possible that your problem isn’t the brightness at all, but the poorly calibrated display that makes it difficult to read in the environment you’re using.
1. Press Windows Key + Me to open system menu.
2. Display must be the first type; select it and scroll down display page and then select Advanced display settings.
3. Now choose Display adapter properties for 1 . Monitor (or whatever screen you want to fix).
4. Now open Color Management tab and choose Color Management.
5. Open advanced tab.
6. Select screen calibration.
From here, follow the instructions in the color calibration wizard.
Change your display adapter settings
Different graphics card manufacturers have their own software packages that control different aspects of how the graphics card interacts with the display. Nvidia has Control Center, AMD has Radeon Software.
Below Display > Brightness & Color, you will find a brightness level slider. Even with the screen’s brightness setting to maximum, you can still push this slider further out. This can produce a few extra lumens of brightness.
Turn off adaptive brightness
If your monitor supports adaptive brightness, you can turn it off. In Windows 10, go to Setting > System > Automatically change brightness and turn off the setting. If you don’t see this option, it means your monitor doesn’t support the feature in the first place.
Turn off features like Insert Black Frame or Variable Refresh Rate
Many monitors now have various features that improve the clarity or smoothness of motion. Unfortunately, some of these features also affect brightness. Chief among these is the BFI or Insert black frame.
This technology inserts a completely black frame between every actual frame of the content. Why? The idea is to simulate the pulse and fade of a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) display. Flat screens (such as LCDs and OLEDs) suffer from motion blur due to their “sampling and holding” nature. They hold the whole image perfectly until the next frame is due and switch instantly. The way we perceive motion and track it on a screen creates blur, and BFI is an effective way to create sharp motion on a flat screen.
Unfortunately, BFI also significantly affects the brightness of the image. As you can imagine, displaying a black screen for half the time can reduce screen brightness by up to 50%!
Some TVs offer VRR (Variable refresh rate) disable local dimming to achieve that. Without the local dimming, the image has significantly poorer contrast and the overall brightness may have to be quite low to avoid a blurred image. Turning off VRR may cause screen tearing in video games, but should resolve brightness and contrast issues.
Turn off Eco Mode or Adjust Power Settings
Some monitors and televisions have an “Eco” mode in their menus. This greatly reduces the amount of screen dimming and alleviates other aspects of how the backlighting works that can result in a much dimmer image.
This significantly reduces power consumption, but the resulting image may be blurry and slightly flickering. The maximum brightness level in these eco modes is much lower than in the standard power option. More importantly, the minimum brightness can actually be very low. On some TVs and monitors, you can adjust the minimum brightness in the display system preferences, so you may want to keep the eco mode but leave the screen a little brighter than the default setting. .
Using third-party software such as F.Lux
Some third-party apps that you can download and install can help you find more brightness or help optimize the way colors, brightness, and contrast are displayed on your screen. The f.lux app is probably the best example of this and you can download it for free. The app is pretty versatile, but its main use is to cut down on the amount of blue light in your images, synchronized with the time of day, which is said to be able to reduce eye strain and help with sleep. .
Turn on HDR
If you have a HDR monitor, you can enable HDR for use in games, during movies, and for your desktop environment. HDR significantly increases the maximum brightness of the display and will result in a significantly brighter display.
1. Open Start menu. Type HDR Settings and open it when it appears.
2. Select display correctly Necessary.
3. On the right side of Using HDRturn the switch to the On position.
If your laptop display supports HDR, you may want to change the Battery Options setting to Optimize for battery life if you want to use the feature on battery power.
Potential downside to pushing brightness above maximum
While you won’t burn your screen by running it in “flashlight mode” for a short time, increasing the maximum brightness can have lasting effects on your screen. . First, if you are using OLED, you only want to run at high brightness levels for very short periods of time. Image retention on OLEDs is still an issue and is more likely to occur at full or high brightness levels.
If you are using an LED LCD monitor, you don’t need to really worry about image retention. However, increasing the brightness too much will make your contrast much worse and can reveal “backlight bleed” on your display, where the edges of the screen don’t fit the bezel.
The biggest drawback to increasing brightness for laptop, smartphone and tablet users is that it is a real battery drainer. In addition to features like Wi-Fi or fancy backlit laptop keyboards, screen brightness drains the battery before you get past the Snyder Cut.
Also, try to darken your environment
While making your screen as bright as possible may be the only solution in some cases, it is often easier to darken your environment or switch to a darker environment. Sometimes the problem is simply that your monitor is at the wrong angle to the light source. Just adjust the angle a little or move the light source, you will see what is on the screen without any problem.
The reverse is also true. When everything is too bright, you cannot read your screen. Some of the latest Android phones offer extreme brightness for sunlight readability, but this leads to hot phone notifications and battery drain if you do so for too long. Therefore, it is best to move to the shade.
