Fast Brightness Control



You can find it in 'control panel.' Press the start icon with the flag in the bottom left and then select something called 'control panel.' Once in there, type, 'Display Brightness' on the search bar and it should pull up a setting to change it! Celebrating 20 Years of Light Control from Gardasoft Vision Liquid lenses: the ideal fast-focus solution Voltage Drive & Current Drive Lighting Controllers A History of Machine Vision part 3: The Future Lighting Controllers - Automation Magazine Jan 2018 Maintaining Constant Image Brightness in MV Systems Liquid Lens Technology for Machine Vision.

A Python tool for controlling the brightness of your monitor. Supports Windows and most flavours of Linux.

Pip:

pip3 install screen-brightness-control

GitHub:

Note:

For running on Linux you will need to install one of these programs: xrandr, ddcutil, light or xbacklight.
Here is a quick outline of each program:

ProgramIs it FastWorks with laptop displaysWorks with external monitorsMulti-display supportRequires RandR support
ddcutilNoNoYesYesNo
xrandrYesYesYesYesYes
xbacklightYesYesNoYes but not individually controllableYes
lightYesYesNoYesNo

Something to be aware of is that xrandr does not change the backlight of the display, it just changes the brightness by applying a filter to the pixels to make them look dimmer/brighter.

To install:

Fast Brightness Control
  • Arch
    • sudo pacman -S xorg-xrandr
    • sudo pacman -S ddcutil
    • sudo pacman -S light-git
    • sudo pacman -S xorg-xbacklight
  • Debian/Ubuntu
    • sudo apt install x11-xserver-utils
    • sudo apt install ddcutil
    • sudo apt install light
    • sudo apt install xbacklight
  • Fedora
    • sudo dnf install libXrandr
    • sudo dnf install light
    • sudo dnf install xbacklight

You can call this module from your command line or use it as a python library (see the documentation section below).

You can read the full documentation for this project for more details but here are the basics.

Fast

get_brightness(verbose_error=False, **kwargs)

Summary:
Returns the current screen brightness as a percentage. It may return a list of values if you have multiple, brightness adjustable monitors.
Raises ScreenBrightnessError upon failure

Arguments:

  • verbose_error - a boolean value to control how much detail any error messages should contain
  • kwargs - passed to the OS relevant brightness method

Usage:

Control

set_brightness(value, force=False, verbose_error=False, **kwargs)

Mac

Summary:
Sets the brightness to value. If value is a string and contains '+' or '-' then that value is added to/subtracted from the current brightness.Raises ScreenBrightnessError upon failure

Windows 10 brightness control

Arguments:

  • value - the level to set the brightness to. Can either be an integer or a string.
  • force (Linux only) - if set to False then the brightness is never set to less than 1 because on Linux this often turns the screen off. If set to True then it will bypass this check
  • verbose_error - a boolean value to control how much detail any error messages should contain
  • kwargs - passed to the OS relevant brightness method

Usage:

fade_brightness(finish, start=None, interval=0.01, increment=1, blocking=True, **kwargs)

Summary:
Fades the brightness from start to finish in steps of increment, pausing for interval seconds between each step.If it runs in the main thread it will return the final brightness upon success, ScreenBrightnessError upon failure. Otherwise it returns the list of thread objects that the process is running in

Arguments:

  • finish - The brightness value to fade to
  • start - The value to start from. If not specified it defaults to the current brightness
  • interval - The time interval between each step in brightness
  • increment - The amount to change the brightness by each step in percent.
  • blocking - If set to False it fades the brightness in a new thread
  • kwargs - passed to set_brightness

Usage:

A Toast

To GitHub users lcharles, Ved Rathi, D.W and Melek REBAI for contributing to this project

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license

Why do I always get ScreenBrightnessError (Linux)?

Why this happens:
The way brightness is adjusted on Linux is the program tries to run shell commands to adjust the brightness.The programs it attempts to call are 'light', 'xrandr', 'ddcutil' and 'xbacklight'.If none of these programs can be called a ScreenBrightnessError is raised

How to fix it:
Install xrandr, ddcutil, light, or xbacklight using your system package manager. See the installation section at the top of this document for instructions on how to do so.

Brightness Control Windows 10

I call set_brightness() and nothing happens (Linux)

Why this happens:
Light requires root access to run, which is usually provided when you manually install it using you package manager.If you installed xrandr or xbacklight, it only supports graphics drivers that support RandR.If you installed ddcutil, this requires root access to run for every query.

How to fix it:
If you installed xrandr or xbacklight: make sure your graphics drivers support RandR.
If you installed ddcutil: make sure to run the script with root permissions.
If you installed light: follow these steps making sure to run the install as sudo or re-compile from source (requires autoconf to be installed):

Fast Brightness Controller

Using the display kwarg does nothing/creates exceptions (Linux)

Why this happens:
The display kwarg is only supported by the Light, XRandr and DDCUtil classes, not by XBacklight. So if you only have xbacklight installed on your system this kwarg will not work

Brightness

How to fix it:
Install xrandr or ddcutil or light using your system package manager. See the installation section at the top of this document for instructions on how to do so.

The model of my monitor/display is not what the program says it is (Windows)

If your display is a laptop screen and can be adjusted via a Windows brightness slider then there is no easy way to get the monitor model that I am aware of.If you know how this might be done, feel free to create a pull request or to ping me an email captaincrozzers@gmail.com

Bfc Brightness Fast Control

When I call get_brightness() the returned value isn't what I set it to (Windows)

Not all monitors can set the brightness for every value between 0 and 100. Some of them have a number of 'levels' that they can be set to.You can likely see this if you open your display settings and very slowly move the brightness slider.
You can find out your brightness 'levels' by running the following python code:

  • If you encounter any issues or bugs with this software please do not hesitate to raise an issue or to email me captaincrozzers@gmail.com
  • It is unlikely that this project will support MAC in the foreseeable future for 3 reasons.
    1. I do not own a (working) MAC.
    2. I do not intend to buy a MAC
    3. From what I have found it is even less straight-forward to adjust the screen brightness from python on MAC
  • If you own a MAC an you happen to know how to adjust the brightness in python then feel free to contribute