Lunar
Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external display
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Alin Panaitiu

Lunar 2.0 - Sync your monitor's brightness with your in-built display 🖥💡

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Smarter controls and a new Adaptive algorithm for your external displays.

• the brightness/contrast can respond to the built-in light sensor readings

• use the brightness keys to adjust external monitor's brightness

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Richard O'Brien
This looks really cool, I especially like the UI design
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@richardobrien Thank you! I hope you also find it useful 😅
Vlad Korobov
waaaaait a minute, does it actually control hardware brightness of external screen connected via hdmi?
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@vladkorobov Yes, that's exactly what it does 😸
Vlad Korobov
@alin23 WAAAAAT I didn't know it is possible. Going to try today. UPVOTE
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@vladkorobov Hehe, thanks! I hope it works fine for you ^_^
Vlad Korobov
@alin23 IT WORKS!
charlie
So this is basically like Flux, right? Any information on why users should switch from that to this?
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@justcharlie It's completely different from Flux. I think Flux adjusts the colors of what you see by fiddling with the GPU configuration. It also has a brightness setting that has nothing to do with the native brightness setting of the monitor's (the one you see in the OSD menu when you press the monitor's physical buttons). I'm not sure how it does it, but I think it just makes the pixels dimmer/darker. Lunar on the other side adjusts the native brightness and contrast settings of the monitor using the DDC protocol. You can see that changing the brightness with Lunar will also be reflected in the monitor's OSD menu. This should give a more natural dimming. So I guess you could use both f.lux and Lunar, as they do different things. F.lux can adjust the display color temperature, and Lunar can adapt your brightness and contrast based on the ambient light in your room. That's how I'm using it right now, just that I'm using the native macOS Night Shift instead of f.lux.
Derk-Jan Karrenbeld
@justcharlie @alin23 Just responding to this: On the f.lux FAQ they state the following: > Isn't this exactly the same as the Macbook ambient light sensor? > No, though they do work together nicely. The ambient light sensor measures the brightness of the light in your room and adjusts the brightness of your screen based on that. f.lux changes the color of your screen and warms it up according to the type of light you're using and the time of day. f.lux doesn't use ambient brightness to adjust colors. You might be in a dark room with very cool light, you wouldn't really want your monitor to look warm, but you would want your display to look dimmer. We've found that when your screen colors match the color of your ambient light correctly, you don't need to adjust monitor brightness as much. F.lux tries to change the warmth of the screen (how blue [cool] or red [warm] it is), in order for you to be able to fall asleep after using your computer late at night. In that sense, it's the same as the Android App "Twilight", which attempts to do the same thing, as well as Night Shift albeit a different feature set.
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@justcharlie @derk_jan_karrenbeld Nice find! Indeed, f.lux and native macOS adaptive brightness work very well together! ☀️ But for external monitors, if you have the brightness set to 90 for example, no matter how dark or warm you set the pixels, you're still getting pretty much the same amount of light in your eyes if the monitor brightness doesn't change. It also uses more electric energy. 🔋 With Lunar, your external monitors can save some energy and lower the strain on your eyes when the environment gets darker. I have a pretty messy schedule, I work in the morning, noon and late at night with pauses in between. So I pretty much depend on the natural light and I would have to always adjust my monitors' brightness and contrast to be in sync with my Macbook built-in display. That's why I made Lunar, to let it do this for me 😏
charlie
@alin23 great info, thanks!
Vlad Korobov

Just AWESOME app. I didn't think it is possible. Love it.

Pros:

Display brightness synced with my mac

Cons:

Wish to have an option to bind external brightness with formula like B=my laptop-10%

Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@vladkorobov Thanks for the review! About the cons, that option is already possible, but it might not be that obvious. That's what the Brightness Offset and Contrast Offset settings are for: https://imgur.com/MXkPrUY The formula behind it is a bit more complex than `B - X%` but works kind of the same way. You can see how the brightness curve reacts to the offset here: https://www.desmos.com/calculato...
Josue Montano
This app also configured my Dell 4K monitor automatically. Colors match almost perfectly my MacBook Pro's display. I'd be glad to pay for it.
Georgiana Panaitiu Iacob

Lunar 2.0 finally takes advantage of the built-in light sensor of my Macbook to bring adaptive brightness for the external displays.

Working in a room with a lot of natural light is much more enjoyable now!

Pros:

Clean design, smart algorithm, useful hotkeys

Cons:

None

Nenad Novaković

Upvoted, but...

This I like about it the most:

- It's free

- It's working as described

- Has clean UI

- Smooth and logical UX

- Manual/Location/Sync Modes

What I did not like, the settings out of the box...

I set the mode to manual to test it out and I used given shortcuts to increase/decrease the brightness/contrast. It all works but changing both and having contrast really high or really low, didn't make sense.

I saw the options for setting minimum and maximum contrast/brightness and after a quick setup modifications, I liked the way it works.

It's not really a con, it's just something to think about... Maybe add a default settings out of the box that works best for most of the people?

Also, I'd really love if you can make brightness keys working, when MacBook is in clamshell (closed-display) mode. Cause currently, the keys are not working and I had to use the shortcuts provided CMD + OPT + NUMBER.

I am using my MacBook in clamshell mode all of the time, unless I hit the road. So this feature might be perfect improvement, if you can make it.

Currently I'm using an "Monitor Control" app, to have my brightness and volume controlled on external screen, but it's buggy.

Pros:

Everything it has, except...

Cons:

Some settings

Alin Panaitiu
Maker
Thank you for the thorough review! The default settings are what worked for me, I can't really know how other monitors are responding to these settings. That's why I added so many knobs. I'll add some analytics in the next version to check what are the most used settings so that I can adjust the defaults based on what the users are using daily. The brightness keys feature has been requested more than a few times, I'll start working on it tomorrow as I'm sure a lot will find it useful. I'd like to hear about how you would see this feature working in regards to the min/max limits and sync/location mode. I'm not sure if I should respect those limits when manually adjusting brightness/contrast through keys. In Sync mode, the best way to do this without falling back to Manual mode is to let the keys adjust the offsets instead of the brightness itself.
Alexander Harding
This is actually amazing.
Jose Daniel Cifuentes
Thank you. and again thank you. This tool is very useful.
Jonathan Leung
THIS IS AMAZING! Holy shit! I'm extremely impressed!
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