Awning
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Awning is a small menu-bar app. One slider takes the blue out of the screen, the other dims it below where the brightness keys stop. Free, with no account.
Try it: this is the app's own warmth curve, applied to the picture on the left. Your real screen changes the same way, and your screenshots stay normal.
Everything else lives behind a settings gear.
Go from ordinary white through candlelight to a screen that is only red. Awning calls that end 0K. It's a name, not a real temperature: at 0K only the red part of each pixel is left.
Brightness goes from 100% down to 10%, past the lowest setting of the brightness keys, on every connected display at once.
The colour change happens in the display's own colour tables, so screenshots, screen recordings and screen shares keep their real colours. We checked with screenshots, QuickTime and Zoom.
Let Awning warm up in the evening and switch itself off in the morning. Sunset is worked out on your Mac from your city, or from your location if you allow it. Fixed times work too.
Turn Awning on and off with ⌃⌥⌘Z, and set your own keys for the presets, warmth and brightness.
Awning sits in the menu bar, not the Dock, and can open at login so your evening setting is ready when you are.
Many screens dim by switching their backlight on and off hundreds or thousands of times a second. You can't see it directly, but some people notice it as flicker or tired eyes.
Flicker-free mode works on built-in Mac screens and Apple displays, and experimentally on one external monitor that supports DDC/CI. Some panels still pulse even at full brightness, so it can't promise zero flicker on every screen. Holding the backlight at 100% uses a little more battery.
No account, no analytics, no tracking, nothing that identifies you. The only time Awning connects to the internet is to check for updates, and only if you turn that on or choose Check for Updates yourself.
Open the download, drag Awning to Applications, then open it. It's signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens like any other app. Look for it in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Yes. There's no trial, no licence key and no paid tier. Every copy does everything.
In the menu bar at the top right of your screen, not in the Dock. Click its icon to open the sliders.
A bug in macOS 26 makes some Macs ignore the colour tables that Awning and similar apps use. Turning off automatic brightness in System Settings, then Displays, helps on many of them. On an affected Mac, flicker-free mode and dimming below 30% still work.
Use one at a time. They change the same colours, so running two at once gives unpredictable results. Turn Night Shift off while Awning is on.
Warmth and dimming work on every connected display. Flicker-free mode needs an Apple display, or a monitor that supports DDC/CI with the experimental setting turned on.
Your screen goes straight back to its normal colours, and so does the backlight. If Awning ever crashes, opening it again restores the colours.