I recently got a new job which uses a VDI infrastructure. We don’t have individual workstations, but rather terminal into a central server which serves us individual desktops. One unfortunate side effect of this configuration is that f.lux (which I’ve written about before) doesn’t appear to do anything. Research suggests that f.lux must talk directly to display hardware to work – no remote desktops.
A co-worker suggested fiddling with the monitor’s color settings to try and reproduce what f.lux does. I hadn’t thought of that before!
It turns out my monitors have pre-built color temperatures, but the lowest they go is 5400k. My color temperature comfort level is more like 3400k, which as it turns out what most office lighting is.
The monitors allow me to manually select RGB percentages. The trick was translating 3400k (f.lux setting) to percentages of red, green, and blue. Searching Google for the RGB values of 3400k revealed this page, which had some helpful information. 3400k translates to the hex values #ffc184.
The last step was translating that hex to percentages. Googling “ffc183 in percentage rgb” revealed this link, which is what I wanted!
In short: 3400k in flux roughly equates to:
100% red
76% green
51% blue
Success! My eyes are much more comfortable now.
Thank you this was so helpful in reducing eye strain. I was about to return my monitor till i found out about flux and even better manually setting it.
Wow really been helpful…I accidentally found a picture look really great when using f.lux and just wanted to find the RGB percentages to adjust it in photoshop. Thank you.
Hi, same experience here. I have a pic that looks great with Flux late night mode and want to replicate in Photoshop.
Can I ask, how did you apply the look to your image?
Did you play with curves or did you have an overlay layer?
Many thanks,
Toby
I realize I’m commenting on a 2 year old post, but THANK YOU. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 that does not do gamma correction, so I can’t run redshift (the linux equivalent of f.lux) on it.
I’m glad I could help!
I solved the Raspberry Pi problem with this as well! Kudos
two years later but still applicable, thanks!
Great recommendation. I had to switch my external monitors to run via USB and f.lux does not support monitors over USB. Great recommendation on the color settings.
This info just helped me fix the horrible eye strain from playing PS4. Thankyou for sharing it!
I’m glad I could help!
Thank you so much. Have recently acquired a new laptop dock and monitors are now connected using displaylink which has rendered f.lux ineffective. I am now so used to a reduced colour temperature that even just a few hours at ‘normal’ temperature was uncomfortable. Just the job 🙂
I’m glad this was helpful!
F.lux does work in rdp sessions with Desktop Composition enabled. But the hardware support is more cpu friendly
thanks 🙂
For those who can’t use f.lux or redshift, but can use terminal – you don’t have to fiddle with monitors. Just use xgamma command. Assuming your default red is 100%, the command to reproduce the above settings is:
xgamma -ggamma 0.51 -bgamma 0.76
Awesome, I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks for the info!
Thank you very much!!
Commenting on a 5 years old post, thank you so much.
You’re welcome, I’m glad you found this post helpful!
Thanks so much man! Had the same issue and 4 years later, it’s just as valuable
I’m so glad this is helpful all these years later!
Very helpful article! The hex to percentages link no longer works for me, but I found https://andylangton.co.uk/tools/colour-converter
Still helpful, 2020! Thank you!
thank you for this! very specific!