Warm the room, keep the grade honest

I am dyslexic. Reading off a white screen is harder for me than reading off paper, and it gets worse the longer the day runs. The fix I have used for years is a colour tint over the page. Not brightness. Colour. A wash of warmth or a specific hue sat over the text, and suddenly the letters hold still. People call it Irlen-style. I call it the only way I get through a long edit without my eyes giving up.

So the first reason Shade_ exists is selfish. I wanted that tint, on my Mac, on every window, all the time.

The second problem: screens are too bright at night

I work nights. By 2am a white editing timeline is a floodlight. And in the age of AI work, the screen never really goes off. We are all vampires now, hunched over a glowing rectangle until sunrise, so every little bit of relief helps.

macOS has Night Shift, which warms the display, and it is fine for browsing. But it warms the whole display. Every pixel. Including the footage I am grading and the photo I am retouching. Which leads to the problem that actually made me build this.

The third problem: a warm screen lies to your colour grade

I do not only do AI work. I shoot, I edit, I grade. And there is a specific, expensive trap waiting for anyone who grades on a warmed screen.

You spend hours on a colour grade. Your screen is warm, either from Night Shift or from the room. Without realising it, your eyes adapt to that warmth and you start compensating for it. You cool the image down to make it look neutral to you. Then you export, open it on a screen that is not warmed, and the whole thing is freezing. Too cool. Hours of careful work, quietly pulled in the wrong direction by your own monitor.

The screen lied to your eyes, so you lied to the grade. I have done it. It is maddening, because the work felt right the entire time.

The fix: Passthrough

This is the whole reason Shade_ exists in the form it does. It warms and dims everything on screen, then cuts live holes through the warmth over the windows you choose. Name your grading window, your reference photo, the design of the site you are checking. Those windows stay completely true. Everything around them goes warm and calm.

The holes track the windows. Move a window, the hole follows. Resize it, the hole resizes. It is not a static cut-out you line up once. It follows the geometry in real time.

So you get the comfort everywhere it does not cost you anything, and a guaranteed-honest window exactly where colour has to be right. No more grading against a warmth you forgot was there. No more guessing whether the blue you are looking at is the real blue.

How it actually works, honestly

The shipping engine is simple on purpose. It is a click-through overlay window sat above every display. It tints. It dims. It does not read your pixels, which means it needs no Screen Recording permission, and the windows underneath stay fully interactive. You click straight through it.

Here is the honest part most "screen filter" apps do not tell you.

The overlay composites source-over. In plain terms, it can only add light and colour on top of what is already there. It cannot darken the pixels beneath it. It cannot pull colour back out from under the tint. It is a comfort layer, not a colour-correction engine. When I say it warms your screen, I mean it lays warm light over the top, the same way a sheet of warm gel over a lamp changes the room without rewriting what the lamp is pointed at.

This matters because it sets the honest ceiling on what the tool is. If you want your whites less blinding, Shade_ does that by adding warmth over them, not by turning them down at the source. The effect on your eyes is real. The mechanism is additive. I would rather tell you that than sell you a filter that pretends to do more.

That single fact, that a Mac overlay window is source-over only and can add light but never subtract it, shaped the entire product. Every design decision downstream of it is me working with that limit instead of pretending it is not there.

The part I am not shipping yet

There is a second engine in the codebase. It transforms live pixels rather than laying light over them, which is the thing that would let you genuinely pull a screen down rather than just warm it up. It works, in the lab.

It is also dev-gated and off by default, because transforming live pixels on macOS can recurse on the system's own screen capture and eat itself. That is a real failure mode, not a hypothetical, so it stays behind a flag until it is safe for a stranger to run without thinking about it. I am telling you it exists because I would rather be straight about the roadmap than quietly hide an experiment. Today, Shade_ is the overlay. The transform is research.

The rest of it

Two more things I needed, so they are in.

A schedule. Manual local time, and it can cross midnight, because my "evening" starts when most schedules have already given up. Set it once and the warmth arrives on its own.

Launch at login. A comfort tool you have to remember to switch on is a comfort tool you stop using. It should just be there.

And the free Hue overlay, the original reason, any colour you like sat over the whole screen. That is the dyslexia reading aid, shipped as a first-class feature rather than an afterthought, because for me it was never the afterthought.

Why it is free

Shade_ is free and open source, signed and notarised, MIT licensed. I did not build it to make money. I built it because I needed it, and because the people most helped by a reading tint are not the people who should have to pay to find out it helps. If it gets one more dyslexic editor through a night shift with their eyes intact, that is the return.

Warm the room. Keep the grade honest. That was the whole brief, and the honest version of it is the one worth shipping.

Shade_ is free. Get it from the download page.

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