With Brightness Slider you can adjust screen brightness from the menubar, just like the sound menu provided by Apple, and with improved control over the dimming process.
Using a keyboard with no brightness keys? Tired of low brightness levels which are still too bright? Brightness Slider gives you total control over your screen’s brightness settings, allowing in particular for a really smooth transition between low light and total darkness.
Features:
– Screen brightness level adjustment right from the menu bar
– Dimming control at low brightness levels
– Arrow key function with active Brightness Slider menu
– Custom hotkeys for lowering and raising brightness levels
– Start at login option available in the preferences
How Brightness Slider works:
Brightness Slider darkens your display by combining two separate methods. Method A adjusts the real backlight intensity of your display and method B creates a semi-transparent black veil above everything else. Why the complexity? Well, when dimming a display, the final jump down to no backlight at all is very large, especially in a darkened room. To provide more control over the dimming process, the top-half of the slider controls the backlight intensity from 1 down to 0.1 (method A). Then, the bottom-half controls the opacity of the semi-transparent veil, whilst keeping the backlight at 0.1 (method B). When the slider is at zero, the backlight is turned off. The result is that the final jump now has several intermediate steps, which means the perceived brightness (the combined result of both methods) is that much more adjustable.
One last thing:
There are displays where Brightness Slider cannot control backlight intensity. However, it can still perceptually dim the screen by controlling the opacity of the semi-transparent veil (which can be created on any display).
Available on the Mac App Store for free.
ACT Productions 
You could start my day with the display at full brightness and then lower it very slowly as it gets near the time of night that I specify in prefs. That would really help!
Best choice for owners of Apple Cinema Displays (Acrylic), now referred to as “Legacy”. After upgrading to OS X Yosemite from 10.7 (Lion), I lost the ability to lower/increase the brightness of my Cinema Display. There is another method, whereby you have to download a file and reinstall it in the systems folder. I found this too complicated. The other method is finding an older Mac with any Pre-OS.X 10.7. Then connect your monitor to that computer/laptop and lower the brightness. Then unplug and reconnect it to your newer Mac OS X (Yosemite). Either way, this app is 100% useful and another great option! Thank you guys here at ACTproduction. Two Thumbs way up for this app.
Thanks so much for this great app. Indispensable, should be OSX native.
One little problem though : when backlight is set low (under apple’s minimum), transitions from /to fullscreen apps have no filter (during transitions, backlight intensity is back to apple’s minimum, which is much higher). That means : in dark environment, when coming from / going to a fullscreen app, the screen “flashes”.
It would be so great to fix it 🙂
PS : I’m on mountain lion 10.8.5, MPB 13” mid 2010
Bless you!!! Just moved from iMac to mac mini with Samsung monitor. Monitor controls are useless. this is an elegant solution. thank you.
Native OS X menubar items allow adjustment of sliders with a two finger slide. That’d be classy.
Great app, one of the few (maybe the only one?) of its kind that allows for assigning keys (F1 / F2 on an Apple keyboard!).
The only thing I am wondering is why the first few steps of dimming don’t seem to have any noticeable impact, only the 9th or 10th notch (aka almost halfway down the slider) is starting to make a difference. Is there any way this could be addressed in a future update if there will be any?