Free macOS app
Your screen, after dark_
Reading comfort that keeps your colours honest. Turn Shade_ on here and the page becomes the demo.
Shade_
Menu bar
The overlay is off by default. Switch it on, then adjust Warmth, Dim, and Hue.
The qualm_
Bright screens at night are brutal. Night Shift warms everything, including the shot you're grading. Dense text still fights back.
Shade_ is a small menu-bar app for the part of the day when your screen is too sharp, too blue, or too loud for your eyes.
It warms and tints the display without taking over the Mac. Then Passthrough keeps the one window that needs colour accuracy clear.
Colour-accurate editing
Warm the whole screen. Keep the one window that can't lie.
Add your grading app to Passthrough. The rest of the desktop stays warm and easier on your eyes; the grade stays clear.
Dyslexia and legibility
A coloured reading tint for the days white-on-black is not enough.
Some people read more comfortably through a coloured overlay. Shade_ makes that a normal screen control, not a sheet of plastic over the display.
Reading tint
A coloured overlay can make dense text feel less brittle on screen. Shade_ lets you choose the hue that suits your eyes, then apply it across the display or keep it gentle for reading sessions.
Irlen-style colour overlays help some readers with dyslexia or visual stress. This is visual comfort only; it does not read text aloud.
Shade_
Menu bar
The menu, for real
One menu. Three jobs.
01
Overlay
On, Warmth, Dim, Hue, and Reset sit at the top because they are the daily controls.
02
Passthrough
Choose the apps that must stay clear, like Resolve, Premiere Pro, or a reference viewer.
03
Schedule
Set a local-time window, cross midnight, and let Shade_ launch at login.
How it works
A tint layer, with honest holes.
The shipping engine is Overlay Fallback: a click-through colour and dim layer over every connected display. It needs no Screen Recording permission because it does not read pixels.
Overlay Fallback is a tint layer. It can add warm light and colour over the screen; it cannot recover colour beneath the tint or transform the pixels underneath.
Reading Transform is experimental and dev-gated. Public macOS display capture plus a fullscreen output window can recurse, so it is not presented here as a feature.
Get Shade_
Free. Just your email.
The DMG is Developer ID-signed and notarised, so Gatekeeper should open it cleanly.
Drag Shade_ to Applications. If you copy it manually, preserve the app bundle metadata so macOS keeps its permissions intact.