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Control the brightness and contrast of the external display, and even automatically manage these settings based on the time of day or ambient light

If you connect your Mac to an external non-Apple monitor, you have to rely on the old-fashioned buttons on the side of the monitor to control the brightness and contrast, which is a bit annoying. Software control is still possible, but it requires a dedicated application.

Lunar calendar That’s the application. It allows you to use simple hotkeys to change the brightness and contrast of the external display, and automatically set it according to the time of day, ambient light, and other devices.

Control brightness and contrast through software

If your external monitor supports DDC, you can usually change its brightness, contrast, or volume from the app. However, this is not guaranteed to be effective because some Macs, adapters and docking stations may not be compatible with the DDC protocol. If you encounter any problems, please check this list.

The advantage of Lunar’s method of controlling brightness/contrast is that it changes the same settings modified by the physical buttons on the display instead of being overwritten by the application software, which is what many similar applications do.

Just like with an Apple display, you can use hotkeys to increase or decrease brightness, contrast, and volume, and use a single key combination to set them to specific values.

Adaptive brightness based on time of day or ambient lighting

Lunar can automatically change the brightness setting of the display according to the time at your location. The curve coefficients, positions, and steps are all customizable, and you can even add exceptions to maintain different settings for specific applications.

Or, the app can change the brightness based on the reading of the ambient light sensor. If you don’t have such a device, you can also synchronize your MacBook’s brightness settings to all connected displays, thereby taking advantage of the laptop’s built-in sensors.

Solutions for M1 Mac

Since the new Apple Silicon Mac lacks DDC support, the same method cannot be used to control the display brightness. The solution is to change the software gamma table to darken the image, which requires the use of physical buttons to set the brightness and contrast of the display to the highest value. This is not an ideal solution, it makes it impossible to control the volume.

Another option is to use a Raspberry Pi, which receives DDC commands and then sends them to your display, but this is obviously not a solution for most users.

In general, if you want to control the brightness and contrast of an external moni tor more easily, Lunar is worth a try. It has many interesting functions and useful shortcuts, you are free to try to make sure it works for your device.

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