One of the worst things about using your iPhone at night is how bright the screen can get. Even when you have the brightness turned all the way down, it feels like the light from the screen is still blinding. Luckily, there’s a way to fix that.

Make Your Screen Dimmer With This Quick Trick

The iPhone is absolutely packed with a ton of accessibility features that often get overlooked. While many of them are designed to make people’s lives easier when they have certain conditions or disabilities, most of us can benefit from them, too.

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Reduce White Point is one of these features, and for the everyday folks out there using an iPhone, this feature might not make much sense just looking at the name. The white point of a display is essentially the temperature at which the color white is displayed.

It’s vital for ensuring colors are showcased properly on a display, but it also doubles as a quick way to make your display dimmer—for when even the lowest brightness is still too bright.

I stumbled upon this feature while looking for ways to make my grandmother’s iPhone screen dimmer. The default brightness levels were too harsh on her eyes, especially at night.

This feature is really easy to enable, and thanks to the iPhone’s Shortcuts app, you can even automate the entire process to make it easy to set it and forget it.

Reduce Your iPhone Display’s White Point Manually

The quickest way to set your phone to reduce the white point is to set it up using the iPhone’s Accessibility Shortcut functionality, which let’s you set a number of things to open or activate when you press the side button three times in quick succession.

To set this feature up:

1. Open Settings and navigate down to Accessibility.
2. Scroll to the bottom section labeled General and find the Accessibility Shortcut option.
3. After tapping it, select Reduce White Point from the list of features.

If you find yourself struggling to tap the button three times quickly enough, you can always edit how quickly you need to tap the side button by opening Accessibility > Side Button and setting the Click Speed to Slow or Slowest.

The downside to setting this feature to the Accessibility Shortcut is that you also have to remember to turn it off when you’re finished with it. Since I prefer to use this feature at night—to help keep my phone’s display dimmer when bright light would hurt my eyes—I prefer to set it up automatically.

Reduce Your iPhone’s White Point With Automatically

The best way to automate your iPhone is to make use of the iPhone’s Shortcuts app. Here, you’ll find a myriad of ways to cut through the manual process needed to open apps, set up features, change settings, and more.

Shortcuts are divided into two main categories: Shortcuts, which require manual activation, and Automation, which can be triggered in a myriad of different ways. For this particular feature, we’ll set up your iPhone’s white point to be reduced at certain times of the day.

To set up an automation on your iPhone:

1. Open the Shortcuts app.
2. Tap Automation on the bottom of the screen.
3. Next, Tap the + icon in the top-right corner and select Time of Day.
4. Set the time to whenever you typically need the screen to be dimmer. I mostly use this feature to make my Standby screen darker, so I set mine to 10:45 PM
5. Set the Repeat frequency to Daily, and then toggle Run Immediately. For less intrusive automation, make sure Notify When Run is toggled off and tap Next at the top.
6. Select New Blank Automation, then search for Set White Point and select it. Make sure the blue toggle word says On and then tap Done at the top to complete the Automation.

Following these same steps but setting the time for sometime in the morning will let you set the feature to turn off automatically. Just ensure you set the blue toggle word to Off in the Automation before saving it. I recommend setting it for sometime shortly before you wake up if you’re using it for Standby like I am.

Now, your iPhone’s white point will be reduced at the set time of day. I prefer to run it both as an Automation and as a manual option, just so I can always turn it on or off as needed. But, of course, you’re free to set it up however it best fits your usage.

This is just one of several handy ways to Automate your iPhone’s daily tasks using the Shortcuts app, and I highly recommend looking into other possibilities, too. There are a lot of great iPhone shortcuts out there that make using your phone easier and quicker.