It is now a well established scientific fact that the blue light emanating from the LED screens can make you stay awake longer. But this blue light can wreak havoc with the natural sleep cycles of your body. This means that longer you stare at your computer’s screen, the fewer are the chances of you getting any sleep. When you have to work late in front of your computer regularly, this can permanently affect your sleeping patterns.
One easy way to tackle this problem is by blocking the blue light coming from your computer screen. An open-source tool called RedShift Tray can be used to reduce the blue light and change the screen color to have warmer temperatures. As the name suggests, this program shifts the screen color towards the red color in the visible color spectrum.
As soon as you launch RedShift, it places an icon in the notification area of the Windows system tray and then quickly changes the screen color. The screen looks a little bit redder, a bit warmer which is great for putting you to sleep. The program is able to detect the local day/night times and switched to the warmer screen temperatures only during the night (when you are supposed to sleep).
You can right-click on RedShift icon in the notification area to disable or enable it. You can choose to colorize the cursor as well as the rest of the screen, whether to enable it in the full-screen mode, and many more options from the this right-click menu.
RedShift Tray also allows you to manually change the screen color using hotkeys. For increasing the brightness, you can press Alt+PageUp and for decreasing the screen brightness you can use Alt+PageUp. A complete list of all the hotkeys is available from the GitHub page for the RedShift Tray project.
You can download RedShift Tray from https://github.com/ltGuillaume/Redshift-Tray.