How to Disable Night Shift for Certain Apps on Mac.
Night Shift (inspired by F.lux) is a built-in Mac feature that gradually changes the screen color from blue to orange, just like at sunset. Research has shown that limiting exposure to blue light helps you sleep better at night.
While this is a smart feature, it doesn’t offer much customization like F.lux does. For example, if you are working on graphic projects or editing video at night, the night shift filter can affect your color perception. To solve this problem, we would use a more convenient app for setting up Night Shift on macOS.
Before we start
To turn on the Night Shift filter on your Mac, go to Preferences Displays Night Shift Schedule. You can also turn Night Shift on and off in the Action Center. To open Action Center, click in the upper right corner of the screen.
While this method works, you will always have to go to the Settings app to navigate to setting to change or disable settings. This makes it awkward and there is no granular control. For example, turn off Night Shift for one hour, or turn it off for certain applications. This is where third-party apps like Shifty come in handy.
Customize Night Shift on macOS
Shifty is a tiny utility application that puts Night Shift filter controls on the menu bar. You can quickly turn off the blue light filter for the active window, active tab, or even turn it off completely. You can also adjust the intensity of the filter using the slider in the menu bar, which makes it handy, and set your own schedule to interrupt the filter. Apart from this, the app also allows you to set keyboard shortcuts, which allow you to customize and fine-tune the filter according to your needs with just keys.
Start by installing the Shifty app from this link on your Mac. Once you’ve installed the app, you need a little tweak that only takes a couple of minutes. Click Next to continue.
Shifty supports Safari, Chrome, Opera and Vivaldi web browsers and offers an instant Night Shift filter for active tabs and windows. You can enable this feature by clicking Yes so that you can turn off the blue light filter for certain websites.
Now all that remains is to provide the application with controls to make the necessary changes to the system. Click Open System Preferences.
You will find the “Privacy” tab open in the “Settings” application. Find the Shifty app icon in accessibility settings, check the box next to it, and block the changes.
This is it. You’re done, now you can simply control the Shifty app from the menu bar.
You can use Shifty to disable Night Shift for specific applications (like Photoshop), websites, and custom time frames. However, there are a few caveats. For example, say if you want to turn off Night Shift for Photoshop, launch Photoshop and turn off Night Shift for it. Shifty will remember your preferences for that particular session. However, if you close Photoshop, Shifty will lose all of its data and you have to start over.
Last words
This was a quick way to set up a blue light filter on macOS. The third party Shifty app offers you more control over the filter implementation. You can easily disable, adjust and set the time period for the blue light filter. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or drop me a line on Twitter.
Read: 4 Best iOS Sleep Modes to Sleep Well at Night