How to Change Brightness on Windows 11

Anyone who spends a lot of time in front of a monitor needs to know how to adjust screen brightness. Adjusting the display brightness helps the user avoid eye strain, save energy, and improve visibility. If your laptop or desktop is situated near a window or outdoor, you might need to adjust the display’s brightness throughout the day according to the brightness of your surroundings.

Even though Windows 11 is designed with simplicity in mind, some new users need some time to get used to it, especially if you are upgrading from Windows 7, XP, and other older versions. If you are new to Windows 11 and wondering how to adjust or change brightness, we got you covered.

Windows 11 offers several different ways to quickly adjust your screen brightness, including the Night light, which lowers the blue light on the screen to reduce eye strain and help you fall asleep.

Adjusting Brightness using Action Center on Windows 11

The quickest way to change your brightness in Windows 11 is through the Action Center. Windows 11’s Action Center is quite different from Windows 10, but the shiny new Action center comes with quick settings and media controls.

Just click any of the three icons (Internet, Sound, and battery) on the right corner of the taskbar, or just press Windows + A to open the Action Center.

Click or drag anywhere on the brightness slider in the Action Center to adjust the brightness of your screen. That’s it.

Adjust Screen Brightness in Windows 11 using Hotkeys (for Laptops Only)

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.

Adjust the Brightness in Windows 11 using Settings

You can also control the brightness of your screen in the Windows 11 Settings app. Here’s how you do it.

Open Settings by pressing Windows + I or by right-clicking on the ‘Start’ button and clicking on the ‘Settings’ option.

Click on the ‘Display’ settings in the System tab.

Under the Brightness & color section, you would see the Brightness slider. Simply drag the slider to control your brightness level.

Control the Brightness in Windows 11 using the Windows Mobility Center

You can also use Windows Mobility Center to increase or decrease the brightness of your device. The Windows Mobility Center offers quick access to the most commonly used settings, such as brightness, volume, battery, external displays, and sync settings.

You can open Windows Mobility Center by right-clicking the ‘Start’ button and selecting ‘Mobility Center’ or by searching ‘Mobility Center’ in the Windows search.

In the Windows Mobility Center, use the slider under ‘Display brightness’ to adjust the brightness to a suitable level.

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.

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

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

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

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 using OSD Software of the Manufacturer

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.

These OSD software are usually provided by the manufacture 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 in Windows 10 using PowerShell

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

Open Windows PowerShell by entering ‘Powershell’ in the Run box or searching for it in the Windows search and clicking the result.

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)

And your 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.