Mac Tip: Use Nocturne or a shortcut to make your screen dark

Here's a great little mac tip that'll help you if you feel that having a screaming white background for all windows on your screen is a bit too overpowering for your eyes. Instead of having a white background, that hurts your eyes and perhaps is not as conducive to your creativity (citation needed...) why not turn the background black and the text white! May be, you'll even save a attowatt of power in the process too (again, citation needed...).

Anyway, here are two tips that you can use to turn down the brighteness of the screen by inverting the colours of your screen to get a much darker background.

Method 1 - Use a shortcut to invert the screen colours on mac

For the first method simply press Command (the key with the apple logo) + Control + Alt + 8 to invert the colour of your screen. It'll make all the white colours black, and all the blue colours orange. However, if you'd like to invert the colours on your screen a bit more gracefully, I'd like to recommend Nocturne. Nevertheless, here's what you get for using the default "accessibility" option provided on your mac without downloading anything: (note: image was similated using Photoshop.. so that you can get an idea of how it looks)

Method 2 - Download Nocturne and Switch to Night

Nocturne

(Free, Mac Only) is a little app that you can use to gracefully invert the colours on the screen to get a much darker background. When I say gracefully, I mean that Nocturne wont just invert all the colours on your screen, but only the desired ones. For example, blues will remain blue and wont be inverted to orange. The same goes for other dark colours like green and so on. You can also do other things like switch the screen to grayscale and pretend like you are using a computer with a monochrome monitor from the past, except its a million times faster. Likewise, you can tint colours to suit your liking and use the light sensors on your Macbook/Macbook Pro to trigger nocturne, and hopefully reduce the stress on your eyes.

Although you might not need it all the time, nocturne is a great little app that is worth the download. Plus, it barely hogs any memory so its great to have it sitting around on the menubar in times of need. It's quite a big step forward from the default inversion tool, and its FREE!