How do you change screen bright­ness in Windows 10 and 11

There are different ways to adjust the screen bright­ness in Windows 10 and 11. You can either adjust the bright­ness yourself in the operating system, have the bright­ness adjusted auto­mat­ic­ally, or change the bright­ness directly on the external screen.

Adjust bright­ness via the settings

Windows offers you the pos­sib­il­ity to change the screen bright­ness pro­gress­ively. This works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Step 1: Open your Windows settings

Click on the Windows symbol at the far left of the taskbar and then on the gear icon that appears just above it.

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Step 2: Go into the System settings

Windows settings are divided into several sections. The screen bright­ness settings are found in the ‘System’ section.

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Step 3: Adjust the bright­ness

Find and click on the ‘Display’ tab (or ‘Screen’ in some cases). In the right-hand panel, you will see a slider that lets you freely adjust the screen bright­ness. There’s also an option to turn on Night light. You can turn on night mode im­me­di­ately (without spe­cify­ing a time of day) by left-clicking on ‘Night light settings’. Adjust the strength of the night light or al­tern­at­ively, simply move the slider to ‘On’.

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Set screen bright­ness via shortcut

The laptop bright­ness can be adjusted with a shortcut so you avoid having to take a detour by nav­ig­at­ing around lots of menus. Many keyboards have two F keys with a sun symbol in the top row. The ‘Adjust bright­ness’ function is assigned to these keys as a secondary function. To execute this, press the [Fn] + [lighter/darker] keys sim­ul­tan­eously. Repeat this bright­ness control process until the desired bright­ness on your laptop is set.

Adjust the screen bright­ness via the Action Center

The Action Center is a quick way of accessing various settings, including the screen bright­ness settings. Windows 10 and Windows 11 both have these options, although the terms they use are slightly different.

Step 1: Open the Action Center

To open the Action Center, left-click on the speech bubble icon at the bottom right of the taskbar in Windows 10. As a Windows 11 user, you will find the option after clicking on the network icon — also at the bottom right of the taskbar.

Step 2: Adjust the bright­ness

Adjust the bright­ness slider (shown by a sun symbol) to the desired level.

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If there is no bright­ness control slider in the Action Center box, look for a tile labelled ‘Brighter’ or the sun symbol. Keep clicking on the tile with the left mouse button until the screen is bright enough for your needs.

Adjust the screen bright­ness on an external monitor

On computers with external monitors, the bright­ness is usually adjusted directly on the monitor instead of the operating system. Using the physical buttons on your monitor, you can call up the on-screen display, which allows you to adjust the bright­ness. The exact position of the buttons and the structure of the on-screen menus depends on the device and man­u­fac­turer, but there are usually small symbols on or above the cor­res­pond­ing buttons to guide you. If you’re in any doubt, refer to the user manual for your monitor to find out how to change the screen bright­ness.

Auto­mat­ic­ally adjust screen bright­ness to lighting con­di­tions

Some computer models have an in­teg­rated light sensor, which enables the screen bright­ness to adjust auto­mat­ic­ally to changing light con­di­tions. It can also be found in the system settings.

The night mode in Windows also offers automatic ad­just­ment. However, instead of using the actual lighting con­di­tions to adjust the screen bright­ness, it works depending on the time of day. Users can either set a period for warmer lighting them­selves or use sunrise and sunset times. Windows is already aware of these times.