While it is a thoughtful feature, it doesn’t offer much customization as F.lux. For instance, if you’re working on graphics projects or editing videos during the night, the night shift filter may affect your color perception. To solve this, we’d use a better utility app to customize Night Shift on macOS.
Before We Begin
To enable the Night Shift filter on your Mac computer, navigate to Settings > Displays > Night Shift > Schedule. You can also toggle Night Shift on and off from the Notification Center. To open Notification Center, click in the upper-right corner of your screen. While this method works you would always have to navigate the Settings app to get to the setting to change or disable the settings. It makes it inconvenient and there are no granular controls. For instance, disable ‘Night Shift’ for one hour or disable it for certain apps. That’s where third-party apps such as ‘Shifty’ comes in.
Customize Night Shift on macOS
Shifty is a tiny utility app that puts the Night Shift filter controls on the Menu bar. You can quickly disable the Blue light filter for the active window, active tab, or even disable it altogether. You can also adjust the intensity of the filter using the slider from the Menu bar which makes it convenient and set a custom schedule for interrupting the filter. Apart from this, the app also lets you set keyboard shortcuts that allow you to adjust and fine-tune the filter to your needs with just the keys. Start by installing the Shifty app from this link to your mac computer. Once you have the app installed, it requires a little setup that only takes a couple of minutes. Click Next to proceed.
Shifty supports Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi web browsers and offers instant Night Shift filter for the active tabs and windows. You can enable this feature by clicking ‘yes’ so that you would be able to disable the blue light filter for specific websites.
The only thing left now is to give the app the controls to make necessary changes to the system. Click “Open System Preferences”.
You would find the Privacy tab open in the Settings app. Find the Shifty app icon under Accessibility settings and check the box next to it and lock the changes.
That’s it. You’re all set, you can now simply control the Shifty app from the Menu bar. You can use Shifty to disable Night Shift for specific apps (like Photoshop), websites, and custom time periods. However, there are few caveats. For example, say, if you want to disable Night Shift for Photoshop, launch the Photoshop app and disable Night Shift for it. Shifty will remember you preferences for this particular session. However, if you quit the Photoshop app, Shifty will lose all its data and you have to start all over again.
Final Words
This was a quick way to customize the Blue light filter on macOS. The third-party app Shifty offers you greater control over the implementation of the filter. You can easily disable, adjust, and set a time period for the blue light filter. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter. Read: 4 Best iOS Sleep Settings to Sleep Soundly at Night
