Black Light Pro is a macOS menu-bar utility that wraps your entire display in programmable colour overlays and filter effects, automatically swapping between them on a time-based schedule you define. Think of it as Night Shift's independent, more capable sibling — one that hands the controls back to you rather than making all the decisions for you.
What is Black Light Pro?
Black Light Pro is a display colour-filter application for macOS, created by indie developer Michel Fortin. It applies full-screen overlays — warm amber tints, saturation shifts, colour inversions, custom hues — and rotates through them automatically according to a daily schedule you set up. Where Apple's built-in Night Shift offers a single slider between two preset endpoints, Black Light Pro lets you construct as many distinct visual profiles as your day demands and attach each one to a precise time window.
The mechanism is elegantly low-friction: design a colour-effect preset, assign it a time slot, and the overlay transitions silently in the background whenever the clock reaches that hour. Because the filter is rendered system-wide, every application on screen is affected simultaneously — no per-app configuration, no exceptions that slip through.
What does Black Light Pro do best?
Granular scheduling is the defining capability here. I run a four-state day: a near-neutral filter during morning photo-editing sessions where colour accuracy matters, a gentle warm-up through the afternoon, a deep amber tone from early evening, and an almost-monochrome mode after midnight. Every transition arrives on time and without any interaction from me.
The colour control itself is the deeper differentiator. Tools like f.lux and macOS Night Shift automate blue-light reduction along a curve calibrated to approximate the arc of natural sunlight. Black Light Pro asks you to decide what the filter should look like — and that latitude pays off in specific, real situations:
- Low-light photography review — a red or amber overlay preserves dark-adapted vision while you evaluate shots at night.
- Accessibility and photosensitivity — custom tints or high-contrast colour inversions can do far more for eye strain than a generic warm slider.
- Observational and dark-room work — any scenario where ordinary white display glow is genuinely disruptive.
- Personalised circadian tuning — your actual bedtime, your preferred amber level, not Apple's statistical average of both.
How much does Black Light Pro cost?
Black Light Pro is a paid application sold directly through Michel Fortin's website at michelf.ca. It is not on the Mac App Store. Pricing sits in the modest range you would expect from a focused indie utility — Fortin has a long, consistent track record of fair, one-time pricing for well-maintained Mac software. You pay once; there is no subscription. Check the site for current pricing and any available upgrade offers if you own an earlier version.
Who should use Black Light Pro?
Black Light Pro earns its place if you find macOS's native display controls too blunt for your needs. It fits well if you:
- Work irregular or night-shift hours and want your display to follow your schedule rather than a default sunset estimate
- Have genuine light sensitivity that Night Shift's coarse slider cannot adequately address
- Do astrophotography, darkroom image review, or any task where ambient display colour needs precise control
- Simply care about the visual character of your screen and want to design that intentionally rather than accept defaults
If you flip Night Shift on and never think about it again, this app is overkill — Night Shift costs nothing and serves most users well. But if you have ever opened Night Shift settings wishing for one more dial, you will feel at home in Black Light Pro within the first fifteen minutes.
How does Black Light Pro compare to Night Shift and f.lux?
Night Shift is the zero-configuration default: free, built into every Mac, and exactly right for anyone who just wants a warmer screen after dark. f.lux adds a richer automatic colour-temperature curve, a sleep-integration layer, per-app exceptions, and it is also free — making it the stronger choice when you want smart automation without manual preset work. Black Light Pro sits above both on the control axis: you are not constrained to orange-ish warming; you can define arbitrary colour effects and wire them to arbitrary times. The trade-off is a few minutes of intentional setup. Once your presets are saved, though, the app runs invisibly and reliably — I genuinely forget it is running until I sit down at my desk at a different hour and notice the display has already shifted.
Compared to Lunar (which targets hardware-level brightness control rather than colour overlays) or macOS Accessibility display filters (static, not scheduled), Black Light Pro occupies a clear niche: scheduled, fully custom-crafted colour mathematics with no ongoing subscription and no fuss.
