How to adjust your iPhone's brightness settings

How to customize the display, sounds, and much more in iPhone and iPad
How to customize the display, sounds, and much more in iPhone and iPad

Through your iPhone or iPad's settings, you can easily adjust the brightness to suit any kind of lighting, whether you be texting in the dark or watching YouTube clips at the beach.

Here's how to adjust the brightness on your iPhone and iPad!

How to adjust the brightness of the screen manually

If the screen is too bright or too dim, you can change this setting to a level more to your liking.

  1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen.
  2. Tap Display & Brightness.
  3. Slide the Brightness bar to your desired level of illumination.

How to turn auto-brightness on/off

If you don't want to manually adjust your brightness all the time, you can let iOS do it for your automatically.

  1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen.
  2. Tap on Display & Brightness.
  3. Toggle the Auto-Brightness switch on or off.

How to make the display darker than the Brightness setting allows

Apple's Zoom accessibility settings can drop your iOS device's low brightness setting by an additional third, and it's easy to set up.

  1. Launch the Settings app
  2. Go to General > Accessibility > Zoom and turn Zoom on.
  3. Make sure the Zoom Region is set to Full Screen Zoom.
  4. Tap on Zoom Filter and select Low Light.

Note: You can alternatively tap the screen three times with three fingers, which pops up the Zoom options window, then tap anywhere to close the Zoom options window.

From there, you can do more minor brightness adjustments from Control Center. (Those of you hoping it's another way to save your battery life will sadly be disappointed, though: The screen "dimming" is actually just a filter, not a physical dimming of your iOS device's screen.)

Questions?

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Serenity Caldwell

Serenity was formerly the Managing Editor at iMore, and now works for Apple. She's been talking, writing about, and tinkering with Apple products since she was old enough to double-click. In her spare time, she sketches, sings, and in her secret superhero life, plays roller derby. Follow her on Twitter @settern.