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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.