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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's a genetic difference. I used to be in camp 1, despite trying Flux many times, but now I'm firmly in camp 2. The change for me was due to a change in working environment, and I imagine that's the difference for a lot of people: if you're in a brightly lit room anyway, then the colours becoming weird is just going to be irritating. If you're in a room with a lot of natural lighting, or trying to work on a plane or a bus, it might be different. Of course, either way, it's not suitable if you're doing colour-sensitive work or if you just want to watch a movie, but for reading or text-editing there's no real downside other than taste.

I think I speak for a lot of Flux users when I say that the point you really notice is when you're working late at night, and you turn off Flux after your eyes have acclimatised and all of a sudden you feel like you're in a tanning booth.

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I have f.lux on my [jailbroken] iPhone 4S and my desktop.

On the desktop I like it simply because it helps automatically "dim" my display in the evening. I don't use much artificial light in my room [it's basically a mancave after 5:00] so a bright display with the standard color temperature is just an exercise in eye-strain.

I can't be bothered to adjust my brightness, contrast, and temperature manually every evening to avoid eyestrain. Since my monitor doesn't have programmable presets, f.lux definitely provides a great [automatic] solution.

On my iPhone it's actually more of an issue, I find myself disabling it frequently. I think this is mostly because I use my phone in a wide range of "lighting contexts." I might walk from the man-cave to a fluorescent-lit kitchen, and then I'll go out into an incandescent living room.

In my car, I find the low color temperature kind of difficult to read, so I'll usually disable it for road journeys. (It probably doesn't help that I have a dark OS theme and my navigation application has a dark blue "night time" mode that is also time activated.)

f.lux does look wrong in a blue-rich lighting environment (like an office building after dark.) It looks ok in most people's homes.

You should set f.lux to match your ambient lighting. If the whites on your screen look more orange than the whites in your room, then you have it set too warm (no benefit from that anyway!).

Might there be a way to sample white balance throughout the day to calibrate it using a webcam and a white sheet of paper? I'd probably start using it again if I could avoid fine tuning color temperatures manually.

Yes we have three implementations of this, and they mostly work but only some of the time :)

Problems: in a lot of dim rooms, the monitor is the main light source, and some webcams have terrible auto white balance. If you're on a Logitech camera it's totally easy, and if you're on a cheap netbook, it's awful. Still, you can solve all that, and we probably will ship a version of this soon.

That's great to know. I could probably turn the screen backlight off for a second while taking the shot. I'll play around with some shots from my camera to see how they vary. I'm looking forward to hearing more about these sorts of features!

That doesn't surprise me. If you're in such an environment, I'd bet that the ambient light would overwhelm the benefits of a tinted display, anyway.

I can attest to this. It's exactly why I don't use it on my work laptop but can't live without f.lux at home.

Granted, I use and like warm lighting at home. I wonder what would be the effect in a house/room that uses daylight lighting.

You should check out Hacker Vision as see what you think: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-vision/fomm...

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