Redshift - better looking monitor at night

English Open Chat
1

What up everybody

I love suse, it’s a GREAT KDE distro, and I thought of something that would make it even better.

I did a forum search and I didn’t find it discussed ANYWHERE so I thought i’d tell you all about it since it seems you all don’t use it.

It’s called Redshift
sudo zypper install redshift is what I did and that was my FIRST time installing a program from the command line in suse, and that was 2 days ago I think

There are videos on youtube about it so if you are interested at all – well I should tell you what it does first
See in the daytime, your monitor is very blue, but that’s a good thing and it helps keep you awake, but at night it’s not such a good thing, and you should change your monitor color to a more red tint.

Instead of doing this manually through the monitor controls, (which may be more effective haha) you can install and run redshift to slowly, and smoothly make your screen a more red tint at night

Please use the following command, also substitute the -l lat:lon command with a location near you.

redshift -t 6400:4700 -g 0.8 -l lat:lon lat can be any number and it can also be a - number (negative) as well as lon

If you need any help just ask

2

Hello and welcome here.

While you seem to enjoy using CLI statements, you can also learn how to post them here with the fewest change of people misreading them: between CODE tags. You get the CODE tags by clicking on the # button in the toolbar above the post editor.

Enjoy!

3

How do I edit my posts?

It seems I cannot edit the FIRST post oh well

and also I can’t add the code …
Bump time LOL:)

4 
sudo zypper install redshift

redshift -t 6400:4700 -g 0.75 -l -80:40

the location does NOT have to be exact but you DO want to get it close so you screen changes at the correct times

… you can can find your lat : lon on the internet

-g changes the gamma level
you can even do R:G:B with R G B being a # for red blue green gamma levels

6400 is a tiny bit lower than 6500 and 4700 seems like the right setting for most…
you can change it to 5000 or 4400 if you want
the numbers can be just about anything like 4457 haha
so find what you like and add it to the startup applications

CTRL C in a terminal will stop redshift also one more thing
if you add -v to the code at the end

redshift -t 6400:4700 -g 0.75 -l -80:40 -v

you can see just which color it’s at

and btw I SERIOUSLY wish this program had a GUI oh, it does but it doesn’t work
It’s called redshiftGUI on the internet, I don’t think it’s in the repos
I mean a REAL gui with a slider and all that

The one for Windows works great and the color numbers are correct but the Linux version doesn’t get that much detail

5

You get about five minutes to edit your post (for typos e.g.).

We generaly do not allow post editing, because then the whole logic of a thread can become a big mess.

6

Ok that’s fine

I hope you all enjoy redshift

7

There is a nice plasmoid to control redshift check out software.opensuse.org

8

OMG – THANK YOU SO MUCH – although I have this running in a VM - Virtualbox and I cannot see the effect I still thank you haha I had NO idea this was created

JUST WOW – and thank you to whoever made the plasmoid even more thanks to you!!!

:)rotfl!lol!

9

On a Dell Lattitude 500 – I added the plasmoid and it wouldn’t work

then after a few minutes I rebooted
added the applet - again haha
and it was BLUE this time :slight_smile:
I changed the setting to my preferences and it works PERFECTLY!!!
WOW this is why I will probably ALWAYS run KDE – just because of the plasmoids
and I typed all this on the laptop you can look it up

it’s got 512mb ram
1.3 GHz cpu SINGLE core
um 18 GB hard drive

THE WORKS haha
Thanks again

10

Bump!
Has anyone tried this program, what do you think about it?
:slight_smile:

11

Hey! timpster Thanks I found it in the KDE extra repo so I installed it from Yast.
I’m Likiing It!
One more thing timpster Welcome to Opensuse & its forum!

12

BUMP

Has anyone else tried this program?
it really helps to reduce eyestrain at night

13

For reducing eyestrain I simply adjust (reduce) the screen brightness, using the pushbuttons on the monitor. Works fine.

14

HAHA, yeah – Don’t ONLY adjust your monitors birghtness, it doesn’t help much on it’s own, the main problem which I would like you to SEE, is that your monitor is WAY too
blue
– proof see the following link –> http://dl.herf.org/flux-ab.jpg

Plenty of things already change the brightness of my screen. Why is this different?
f.lux changes the color temperature of your display. Natural light is more blue,
But NOT as blue as your monitor or TV at night] < I added that
while most artificial light (including candlelight) is warmer. Incandescent bulbs, which we’re all used to, become more red in tone when you dim them. But newer LEDs and CFLs don’t - this includes the backlight on your monitor. If you’re a photographer, you’ve probably dealt with this, since pictures taken inside at night are always much more brown than photos outside.

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.

What is color temperature, exactly?
The term color temperature is a way to numerically describe how much red or blue light is illuminating a room. Color temperature is measured in Kelvins, and is determined by the kind of light you’re using. Confusingly, warmer (more red) light sources are described in lower degrees Kelvin. Compared to indoor lighting, daylight is cool - very blue. A candle is around 1800K, while a sunny day might be 6000K. An overcast day is more blue, so it might be around 7000K.
Most computer monitors display around 6500K. If you are using incandescent task lights behind your computer, those are around 3000K.

Get ANY type of camera whether it be on a phone, ipad, tablet, droid, digital camera ANY camera, and set the ‘‘white balance’’ to incandescent, or flourescrent, preferable incandescent.

Now look at your computer monitor through your camera… THEN, start redshift
, install redshift with yast or
sudo zypper install redshift && redshift -t 6500:4700 -l 55:45
the -L lowercase, is VERY important… PLEASE set your location correctly or your screen will change at the wrong times

If you have any questions about redshift, I sure don’t mind helping you answer them.

15

Ok I am using redshift on one of my computers and it works out good.

However, I am now worried about using it because you keep lurking in this thread and pushing the product. I am uninstalling as we speak.

16

On 2013-05-21 04:06, anika200 wrote:
> Ok I am using redshift on one of my computers and it works out good.
>
> However, I am now worried about using it because you keep lurking in
> this thread and pushing the product. I am uninstalling as we speak.

Yes, I also wonder why.

Plus, I would like to read a reference (medical or university study)
demonstrating that it is good for the eyesight. All my house lighting is
done with compact fluorescent lamps of the high colour temperature type
(or “daylight”), I never buy the “warm” color type.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

17

On Tue, 21 May 2013 02:06:02 +0000, anika200 wrote:

> However, I am now worried about using it because you keep lurking in
> this thread and pushing the product. I am uninstalling as we speak.

It’s an OSS package, obviously (to me) the guy’s just a fan of it. I’ve
got it installed myself on two systems (can’t get it to build on the
SLES10 system I have) and it’s really helping me at night, too.

The code hasn’t been touched in a couple of years. Seems that it doesn’t
need much maintenance.

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

18

On Tue, 21 May 2013 14:43:12 +0000, Carlos E. R. wrote:

> Plus, I would like to read a reference (medical or university study)
> demonstrating that it is good for the eyesight.

It’s a pretty well-known fact in some communities that red light is
easier on the eyes in a low-light situation. Astronomers use red lights
for illumination in order to not screw up their night vision when out
observing. Aircraft use red lights in the cockpit so pilots’ night vision
isn’t affected when they’re looking out of the windows in the cockpit.

It has to do with the chemistry of the eye; low-energy red light doesn’t
trigger the eye to produce the chemicals it needs to deal with high
energy light situations.

I found this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2251/why-are-red-lights-used-in-
darkened-control-rooms-and-other-low-light-situations

(Not a medical or university study, but a pretty good explanation of
what’s going on in the eye).

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

19

On 2013-05-21 20:33, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 21 May 2013 14:43:12 +0000, Carlos E. R. wrote:
>
>> Plus, I would like to read a reference (medical or university study)
>> demonstrating that it is good for the eyesight.
>
> It’s a pretty well-known fact in some communities that red light is
> easier on the eyes in a low-light situation. Astronomers use red lights
> for illumination in order to not screw up their night vision when out
> observing. Aircraft use red lights in the cockpit so pilots’ night vision
> isn’t affected when they’re looking out of the windows in the cockpit.
>
> It has to do with the chemistry of the eye; low-energy red light doesn’t
> trigger the eye to produce the chemicals it needs to deal with high
> energy light situations.

Yes, I’m aware of that situation. I want my car display to go in red,
not green as is the fashionable.

When it is important to keep the eye in “night mode”, to see in the
dark, you have to use red lights or the eye gets blinded and you can not
see anything illuminated only by the moon or the stars.

But we are talking about computers in well illuminated rooms. Why should
I shift the tint to red at night, when I don’t do that with my room
lights? If the display darkish I can’t read it well.

I’m even using artificial lights during the day at noon…

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

20

On Tue, 21 May 2013 23:03:06 +0000, Carlos E. R. wrote:

> When it is important to keep the eye in “night mode”, to see in the
> dark, you have to use red lights or the eye gets blinded and you can not
> see anything illuminated only by the moon or the stars.

Some users actually use their PCs in the dark (I’m one of those kinds of
users).

If you’re not, then don’t bother with redshift. Simple. :slight_smile:

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C