How to Change Brightness on Windows 11

Adjusting the brightness of your screen in Windows 11 is a simple process that can help make your computer more comfortable to use, especially under varying lighting conditions. Whether you're looking to save battery life on your laptop or make the screen easier on your eyes, Windows 11 offers several ways to control screen brightness. Here's how to do it.

Change Brightness Using Quick Settings

One of the quickest ways to adjust the brightness on a Windows 11 device, especially on a laptop, is through the Quick Settings panel.

1. Click on the battery, Wi-Fi, or speaker icon located on the right side of the taskbar to open the Quick Settings panel.
2. Locate the brightness slider, represented by a sun icon.
3. Drag the slider left to decrease brightness or right to increase it to your preferred level.

Adjust Brightness via Windows Settings

1. Press Windows + I keys together to open the Settings app.
2. Click on System from the options on the left sidebar.
3. Select Display from the list of options on the right.

4. Under the "Brightness & color" section, you'll find the brightness slider. Adjust it accordingly to increase or decrease the screen brightness.

Use Dedicated Keyboard Keys

Most modern laptops come with dedicated keys on the keyboard to quickly adjust the screen brightness. You can look for the brightness-specific sun symbols on the function keys from F1 to F12 (In some laptops, they will be located on the number keys on the right).

Usually, you have to press and hold the Fn key + the brightness keys (in our case F7 and F8) to increase and decrease the brightness of your screen. In some notebooks, you only need to press these hotkeys without the Fn key.

Unfortunately, you won’t get these brightness hotkeys in the desktop keyboards. However, if you are using external monitors, you would probably have dedicated buttons or menu buttons through which you can access settings for controlling brightness. You can find these buttons at the bottom or side of the monitor panel.

If the Brightness Slider is Missing or Not Working

If you're unable to adjust brightness because the slider is missing or not functioning:

1. Right-click on the Start button and select Device Manager.
2. Expand the Display adapters section.
3. Right-click on your display adapter listed and choose Uninstall device.
4. Confirm any prompts to uninstall.
5. Restart your computer. Windows 11 will automatically attempt to reinstall the display driver upon reboot.
6. If the issue persists, return to Device Manager, right-click on the display adapter, and select Update driver > Search automatically for drivers.

Automatically Adjust Brightness Based on the Power Mode

If you’re using a laptop or tablet, the device screen consumes a lot of energy when you are on battery with full brightness. So, Windows 11 provides an option to automatically lower the brightness of your device when you enable the battery saver mode. This, in turn, decreases energy consumption and increases battery life.

To enable this option, first, right-click on the Battery icon in the system tray, on the right side of the taskbar, and select ‘Battery saver settings’.

Alternatively, you can navigate to Settings → System → Power & battery.

In the Power & battery window, open the ‘Battery saver’ settings.

Then, turn on the ‘Lower screen brightness when using battery saver’ toggle. Now, whenever you enable the ‘Battery saver’ mode, your screen dims itself to conserve battery.

If you’re on battery, you click on the ‘Turn on now’ button next to ‘Battery saver’ to enable the Battery saver mode, immediately.

Or, you can also click the ‘Battery saver’ button in the Action Center to turn on the Battery saver mode.

You can also choose at which percentage you want the Battery Saver mode to turn on automatically. To do that, choose the percentage in the drop-down next to the ‘Turn battery saver on automatically at’.

Remember, the Battery saver mode can only be enabled when your device is not plugged in.

Enable Night Light to Reduce Brightness Impact on Eyes

Computer Screen emits blue light, which can cause discomfort to your eyes and disrupt your sleep quality at night time.

The Night light is a great feature in Windows 11 that lowers the blue light emission from the screen and displays warmer colors to reduce eye strain and help you fall asleep. When you turn on this feature, it filters out the harmful blue light and displays warm yellowish colors without ever reducing the brightness of your screen.

1. Go to the ‘Display’ settings by navigating to Settings → System → Display. Then, enable the ‘Night light’ toggle under the Brightness slider.

2. If you want to further customize the Night light feature, click on the Night light option or on the arrow, not on the toggle.

3. You can use the ‘Strength’ slider to adjust the intensity of the warm colors.

4. You can also schedule the night light by turning on the toggle bar next to the ‘Schedule Night Light’ option under the Strength slider. Then, you can schedule the Night light either between sunset to sunrise or between a specific time.

Adjust Brightness on External Monitors

External Monitors and laptops often come with their own On-screen display (OSD) software (usually as part of drivers), which is a control panel that allows you to adjust components of the display, such as brightness, contrast, viewing position, etc. You can use the OSD software to adjust the brightness of the device screen.

For example, Acer offers Acer Display Widget, Lenovo laptops offers Lenovo Energy Management software, and ASUS provides ASUS Display Widget or Armoury Crate, etc. This software will be different for each brand and even models of the same brand.

The manufacture usually provides these OSD software as part of drivers or as built-in software, or they will be automatically installed when your update your Windows, or you can also download and install them from the manufacturer’s website.

Change Brightness Using Graphics Card Driver Software

Most of the computers have Graphics Cards or Video cards (especially systems running Windows 11), such as Nvidia, AMD, or Intel in them. If your computer has Video Driver installed in it, then you can easily control settings such as brightness, contrast, gamma, and color channel from within the driver’s own configuration app.

You can find this Video Driver app in the overflow area of the system tray, as shown below.

If you have an Nvidia video card in your system, you would have ‘Nvidia Control Panel’ driver, or if you have an AMD video card, you would have ‘AMD Catalyst Control Center’ or ‘Radeon Settings’, or if you have integrated Intel graphics card, you would probably have ‘Intel HD Graphics Control Panel’. If you use any other graphics card, they would have their own driver app, which you can use to adjust brightness and other display properties.

If the video driver is not running in the System tray, you can search for it in the Windows Search and open it from the result.

Alternatively, you can right on the desktop and select ‘Show more options’.

And select your video driver’s control panel from the old context menu.

For Nvidia Graphics Drivers

Open the Nvidia Control Panel, expand the ‘Display’ setting on the left pane and click on ‘Adjust desktop color settings’ in the display tree on the left navigation bar.

If you have more than one display, choose the display you want to change, and move the slider for ‘Brightness’ to adjust the brightness of your screen. Once you’re done, click ‘Apply’.

You can also change Gamma, Contrast, Digital vibrance, Hue, and color channel in this configuration window.

For AMD Graphics Drivers

For AMD video cards, open the Catalyst Control Center or Radeon Settings, and navigate to Desktop Management → Desktop Color. Under the Desktop Color, choose the display (if you have multiple displays) that you want to configure and adjust the brightness to your need.

For Intel Integrated HD Graphics

If your device has Intel integrated HD graphics card, open Intel HD Graphics Control Panel by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting the ‘Graphics Properties…’ or ‘Intel HD Graphics Settings’ option from the context menu. Alternatively, you can also open it from the System tray.

In Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, select ‘Color Settings’ from the left sidebar, and adjust the brightness in the right pane.

You should know that access to the settings for adjusting brightness can sometimes differ between driver versions of the same video card.

Control Brightness using PowerShell

You can also use the powerful PowerShell to control the brightness of your screen.

1. Open Windows PowerShell by entering ‘Powershell’ in the Run box or searching for it in the Windows search and clicking the result.
2. To adjust the brightness, type the below command and press Enter:

(Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/WMI -Class WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods).WmiSetBrightness(1,"Brightness Level")

In the above command, replace “Brightness Level” with the percentage you want to set for your display’s brightness, from 0 to 100.

For example, to set the brightness at 50%, use this command:

(Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/WMI -Class WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods).WmiSetBrightness(1,50)

Your computer's brightness will be changed immediately.

Third-Party Tools to Adjust Screen Brightness

With Windows built-in brightness control, you can only control the brightness of the screen. But if you wish to adjust brightness, contrast, gamma, color temperature, RGB colors settings, and more, then you need to use one of the various third-party tools (free or paid) available on the internet.

Here is the list of free, reliable brightness control software for Windows 11:

1. Win10 Brightness Slider
2. F.lux
3. ClickMonitorDDC
4. Dimmer
5. Gammy
6. Gamma Panel
7. Free Monitor Manager
8. RedShift GUI
9. iBrightness Tray
10. CareUEyes

That’s it.