Whatever the type and brand of your computer screen, it is important to adapt its brightness to your use and the ambient light. And Windows allows you to adjust it more easily than with the buttons.
A screen that is too bright or, on the contrary, a little too weak, can have a certain impact on eye fatigue. Especially if you spend all day staring at it. A very bright screen can thus give the impression of seeing more clearly, with very bright colors but can cause harmful glare in the long run. A screen that is too dark gives a feeling of calm but requires more effort to decipher what is displayed on it. It is therefore necessary to find the right balance and not hesitate to modify the settings during the day according to the variations of the light conditions of the place where you are but also of what you do on the computer, because we n You don’t need the same light depending on whether you’re working on text, processing images or watching a video.
Unfortunately, adjusting the brightness is not as simple as it used to be on CRT monitors that had a dedicated knob for this function. Today, on external flat monitors, manipulations are not always obvious with buttons that can be nestled in places that are not very accessible – below, at the back – and a menu – the OSD, to On Screen Display – capricious and fleeting, tricky to tame… As for laptops, it’s simple: there is no button to adjust the display except for a function key to increase or decrease the brightness – be careful, you have to often press the Fn key to access it! And if some models have, like most smartphones, a system for automatically adjusting the brightness of the screen according to the ambient light thanks to a sensor generally located near the webcam, this device is not always efficient or very subtle.
Fortunately, Windows 10 and Windows 11 have settings that allow you to quickly and finely adjust the brightness, without complex manipulations. Note that the methods we describe here are especially useful on laptop PCs, which have no other settings. They can also be used on a fixed PC with an external screen, under certain conditions – not on a monitor connected to an old VGA socket, for example, which does not allow this kind of control. Do not hesitate to test them!
How to adjust screen brightness in Windows?
As often, Windows 10 and Windows 11 offer several ways to achieve the same goal. This is also the case for accessing the screen brightness settings, if you are not satisfied with the levels of settings offered by the keyboard keys of a laptop PC.
From Notification Center
► Open Notification Center by clicking on one of the icons nestled in the bottom right, near the time. You can also press the shortcut Win + HAS. The brightness level is displayed above the sound setting. Adjust the brightness slider to your liking by dragging it left or right with the mouse.
From Windows Settings
► Press the shortcut Win + I to access Windows settings. In category Systemclick on Screen.
► Here you can adjust the brightness of the screen by moving the eponymous slider to the left or to the right.
► Note in passing the presence of the option Night lighting which reduces the blue light emitted by the screen and which can interfere with falling asleep. You can activate it if you use your PC after dark to give the display a more restful yellow tint.
► By clicking on the option Night lightingyou can vary the intensity of this yellow color or even schedule its activation so that the switch operates at a fixed time, depending on the time of sunset (then defined by Windows according to your location) or at the time that you wish.
How do I adjust the screen brightness from the Windows taskbar?
To avoid having to repeatedly open menus and submenus to access brightness settings, you can use the free utility Win10_BrightnessSlider.
► With this small free tool, you have the brightness settings directly in the taskbar of Windows 10 or 11.
Download Win10_BrightnessSlider
► Launch the tool. Immediately, a brightness icon appears at the end of the taskbar. Click above. All that remains is to adjust the brightness by moving the slider to the right or left.
► If you need to adjust the brightness of multiple screens, right-click the icon of Win10_BrightnessSlider in the taskbar and choose Detect monitors. Click again on sound icon to make adjustments to detected monitors.
How do I adjust the brightness of multiple displays in Windows?
Do you use several external monitors simultaneously connected to your PC? With the free Monitorian utility, one click is all it takes to monitor them all at once.
► Monitorian is a free and open source tool. It allows one click to adjust the brightness of all your monitors. Convenient if you use two or three screens simultaneously. To do this, your screens must embed the DDC/CI standard (Display Data Chanel/Command Interface or screen data channel/Command Interface) which allows the PC to communicate with the monitor and give it orders, in particular on its brightness and contrast settings.
► Launch the software. It then presents an icon at the end of the taskbar. Click above to adjust the brightness of the main screen by dragging the slider to the right or left.
► To manage multiple monitors at once, right-click on the Monitorian icon in the taskbar. From the menu that appears, choose Enable Unison Move.
