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I have seen apps that lower the brightness, but is there a way to get rid of all light colored backgrounds such as (selectively?) inverting the image colors? For instance, I have an app that only provides black ink on a white background; this emits a lot more light at any brightness level than if I could reverse it to show white ink on a black background while in night mode. Ideally even all light colors would turn to solid black and all dark ones to a gray light enough to see. Some apps provide the ability to control these colors, but others do not.

Is there some in-built way to accomplish this starting with any specific Android version, or some other way to accomplish this? Simply reducing "brightness" is insufficient when the goal is to be able to use the tablet for short periods during the night without disturbing one's partner or even affecting one's own sleep cycle.

Update: Also, it seems the backlight by itself emits a lot of light even on a black screen, and the filter approach does not seem to affect this at all.

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  • You'd be better off on a phone with an LED screen. That way, there wouldn't be a blacklight, so making the image darker would actually make the whole thing emit less light. – Dan Hulme Sep 9 '14 at 8:07
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I have found under setting (in Android 4.3 anyway) that I can go to Device: Accessibility:Negative Colors. This will produce the "inverse video" effect so normally white backgrounds are black. In conjunction with normal (or app enhanced) screen dimming this reduces liht significantly over the normal black on white output.

I will update this answer if I find a way to control backlight brightness.

Update: This mechanism does not work when the onscreen keyboard is involved, as those are typically dark and negative video makes them too bright.

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  • Note that not all phones have this: it's a Samsung-specific accessibility feature, not a standard part of Android. Since you didn't say in your question what phone you have, nobody else would have suggested this. – Dan Hulme Sep 9 '14 at 8:07
  • This helped me on an LG G5 because Screen Color Inversion got turned on somehow (I think during update to Marshmallow). I wasn't looking in Accessibility. Thanks! – Mark Balhoff Nov 19 '16 at 20:41
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The one I use is Screen Filter https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.haxor&hl=en free.

It doesn't invert any colors, but has the lowest brightness setting of any filter app. Use in conjunction with system brightness to achieve any level of brightness needed.

In this Android tutorial, William J. Francis demonstrates how to read and write to the LCD backlight brightness control.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/control-androids-lcd-backlight-programmatically/

Its some good reading, very nice write up. This is how I'm going to fix my backlight brightness.

But here's another filter app that's free https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digipom.nightfilter&hl=en No programming required.

"Night Filter is an easy to use screen filter application for your Android phone or tablet. Night Filter makes it easy for you to dim your screen, adjust your color tint, and more! Use it to read at night with less eye strain and correct for an excessive screen tint."

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  • Thanks, I tried that. Two issues: one, it doesn't really dim a white background enough, and two it reduces contrast making it harder to see when it is dimmed enough to make any real difference in output. It also does not seem to dim the backlight any (black screen still emiys a noticable amount of light) but that's a separate issue. – Michael Sep 9 '14 at 5:48
  • Thanks for the update. I'll check out the other two links you added. – Michael Sep 9 '14 at 15:01
  • I tried the Night Filter app and while it worked fine for already dark backgrounds, it still does not dim white backgrounds enouh at any setting. also, it interacts strangely with "negative colors" actually making liGht backgrounds brighter somehow. – Michael Sep 16 '14 at 5:07

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