Review: f.lux makes your computer usable at night

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If you're reading this late in the day, pause to consider your eyes. Can you feel that familiar sting that comes from looking at a glaring LCD for too many hours? That's only the most noticeable symptom of what happens to our bodies when we spend hours staring into what's essentially a big, bright, lamp. F.lux is a simple and free app that helps fix this.

f.lux knows what time the sun sets wherever you are.

Turning down your monitor's brightness may help, but brightness isn't really the main issue: Color temperature is, and that can be trickier to adjust. Most computer screens emit bluish light that looks good in daytime, but becomes uncomfortable to look at in a dark room. It can also affect your sleep: Research suggests that reading on a tablet for two hours before bedtime can delay your sleep by about an hour.

F.lux helps by asking you where you're located in the world, then figuring out the approximate sunset time for your location. Come sunset, your screen will mimic nature, gradually warming up the colors and blending in much better with the surrounding light. You basically get your own private mini-sunset, ending up with a screen that's nice to look at.

f.lux now lets you adjust your monitor's brightness with keyboard shortcuts.

This basic functionality—tuning your screen's color temperature according to time of day—has been part of f.lux for years now. A recent version adds some new bells and whistles: You can now change your screen's brightness using Alt+PgUp and Alt+PgDn. This isn't exciting if you use a laptop, but for a desktop user like me, it's a great feature.

Another new feature is the so-called Darkroom Mode. Whereas the normal f.lux effect just warms up your colors, Darkroom Mode completely takes over your display, shading everything in dark, reddish hues. This makes videos unwatchable, but also means you can probably use your computer at 3am without losing your night vision.

You can dial in your own nighttime color temperature to suit your environment.

Since we don't all work with the same ambient lighting, f.lux lets you dial in a color temperature for nighttime. It uses Kelvin notations (commonly used for color temperatures), but also offers human-readable explanations ranging from "Ember" (1200k) to "Sunlight" (5000k).

All of these color changes are great, unless you happen to be trying to watch a movie. That's where Movie Mode comes in: This mode tones down the color effects for 2.5 hours, to let you watch a movie without having everything tinged red. You can also completely disable f.lux for one hour (for doing color-sensitive work such as photo editing), or until the next morning.

F.lux was a very good app to begin with, and this release only makes it better. If you're not using it yet, but do use your computer at night, you really should try it out today.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Meet the Team: Chintan Intwala – Computer Scientist

As a Photoshop engineer and an avid user of the creative software, I constantly tried to find ways to make something that would not only add new functionality to Photoshop but also make it simple and fun to use. However at the heart of these efforts were simple ideas, ideas that were fueled by my intuition and for that time being, had taken over my life. Blur Gallery is an example of this mental exercise.

As far back as I can remember, cars and all automotive inventions have been an object of my fancy, a fascination that has turned me into an amateur race driver and a religious follower of automotive news. Looking back, I suspect that beautiful car posters that covered the wall space of my adolescent room had a lot to do with it. There is something evocative about a photograph of a Lamborghini—sweeping through a scenic European landscape with a distant glow of the city lights in the background—that has always grabbed me. I would spend time analyzing what would make this beautiful photograph so appealing. In my opinion, the answer lies in tasteful editing, but of equivalent importance is the presence of naturally occurring blurs and bokeh shapes introduced by the camera. While the effect achieved from a real photograph taken via a camera rig will be more complex, I challenged myself to achieve the same effect in Photoshop using pictures from a quick photo-shoot of my car and bike. What I discovered propelled me to do Blur Gallery.

After spending many hours of painful masking, blurring and compositing, I couldn’t accomplish anything that looked impressive or believable. While I’m no professional, this is also because of the shortcomings of current workflows in Photoshop around blurring. First, existing capabilities don’t support spatially-varying blurs in a way that can be easily manipulated. Second, it’s not at all easy to combine different blurs with precise local control. Third and the most painful piece is that there is no live preview to make predictable progress. I figured, if I am having trouble with this, I’m sure many people are having the same issues. I thought to myself, “Wait a minute… if there is any software that should do this awesomely, its Photoshop!!”

Blur Gallery was accomplished after an extensive collaboration with our internal research as well as technology teams. Key contributors include Gregg Wilensky (ATL), Matthew Bice (UXD), Baljit Vijan (AIF), Mausoom Sarkar (ETG) and our QE, Michael and Meredith. In all the considerations related to workflows, we made sure we valued simplicity, approachability and ease of experimentation the highest. Consequently, Blur Gallery is the first of its kind task-based workspace that brings all the new tools in an appetizing screen-full bite. This new space makes it very easy to combine and manipulate effects directly on the screen. The ability to do on-canvas editing not only makes the workflow feel modern, but also more tactile and playful. However, the prerequisite for playfulness is interactivity and we achieved it by investing in OpenCL acceleration. Underneath all the innovative experience design, we also have a powerful technology: parametric masks to control the spatially varying blur patterns and physically based bokeh effects with creative controls that are not otherwise possible in camera.

With Blur Gallery, a first version of a new paradigm, we experimented with blurs related to camera-lens. Adobe is currently working on various motion-related blurs that are present in automobile photography and I’m super excited for when it will release. These new blurs will add even more realism and beauty to your photos while keeping the entire user experience playful, productive and creative. Adobe is also eager to gather feedback on Blur Gallery to make it even better.

Editor’s Note: After completing his work on Photoshop CS6, Chintan Intwala began pursuing an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. We thank him for his hard work on the Photoshop team and wish him the best at b-school

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Demystifying some computer terms

It has come to my attention that some of their (who nameless thanks to my sense of restraint and corporate responsibility remain) were left behind in the world of computer science. Just suppose - for the time it takes reading to this post-, that it not your fault. In fact, I think I know why so many of you are reluctant directly there and start mail merging and romp in the task pane: you have free no idea what these things are or how she a better life can - type or at least some of your time.

If you try to get help - an unknown term or expression - any help the feeling can deer in-the headlights, stymieing you in your jump across the highway of knowledge.

For example, what is the difference between:

a context menu and a keyboard shortcut? Server and client? Menu, menu and tool bar?

Also, are these what???

If you read my complete list you my column Demystifying some computer terms.

"I personally think we developed language because of the our deep need to complain."  -Lily Tomlin

Office partner

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