I would like to start off by saying, this may seem “niche” or personal, but there is tons of research http://www.justgetflux.com/research.html
There is a lot more, especially from Harvard medical school: http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side
As well as the American Medical Association, but it’s behind a sign up / paywall, and also I cannot find it. On to the point. Redshift makes your screen less white, more … light orange at night, and it now does so in a correct, very accurate way since 1.9 updated the color tables. It was extremely red before and I’d constantly tell people to run it with a higher setting when they started out.
So, what does redshift try to accomplish? It makes your screen more orangish / yellowish (but more orange) similar to that of a candle if you choose that setting (1900K). Here’s a good chart:
http://www.frostelectric.com/images/content/colortempchart.png
This helps you relax, as the bright white light is no longer directly emitted from the screen, but instead blocked by darker colored pixels if you want to get crazy specific. The warmer, more orange / yellow whatever color that it shifts your screen to will let your body know it is at least sunset, or something to that effect, and it’s time to relax. We are still tuned to the rise and fall of the sun, whether you want to believe it or not, there’s nothing natural you can do to change that (you’ll seriously get sick if you try to).
I really don’t know what else to say about how it works, I guess if you have any questions just ask!
Anyway, I think it’s a wonderful program, and I think this needs more awareness. Sure everyone knows “T.V.'s keep you awake at night” yeah duh! but nobody knows “how much”. Also since you’re **MUCH **closer to a computer monitor, that actually makes it brighter than a T.V. yeah, the closer you get to an object, the brighter it is to your eyes. It’s a thing.
I hope you all think this program is useful, and I hope you try it out, as I loved it on Manjaro Linux (had to run it to install the new 1.9 version, I was desperate to see what they did with the new color tables–they match f.lux indistinguishably!).
F.lux are the people with the tools to measure this stuff, but redshift is for actually bringing it to linux in a working fashion. So thanks to the dev of Redshift for all his hard work, as without it, you all would need to resort to using “Wine” and installing the windows version of f.lux.
Final note, there is a KDE plasma widget for Redshift!
