I've been reading up on the potentially harmful effects of blue light, specifically in the form of macular damage/macular degeneration.

I found a few studies on the topic but I'm honestly not informed enough to really understand them:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4734149/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39741521/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11157889/

From what I have read so far, it sounds like there is some evidence that blue light can cause macular damage, but not enough to really conclude with much certainty.

One idea I have heard, is that the reason things like LED lights, and device screens, could be especially bad for your health, is that they have a fairly "blue tinted" spectrum, compared to something like sunlight, which is a lot more balanced:

Example diagram
Example diagram 2

The idea being that having a lot of blue light, without much light of other colours, can cause damage, where a more balanced spectrum could not.
A term I have heard is "Rhodopsin mediated photo reversal", and the idea that this is caused specifically by a lot of blue light + the absence of other wavelengths (as opposed to a balanced spectrum like sunlight, or an old fashioned "hot" light bulb)

My 2 main questions are:

1. Is it true that not just the absolute intensity, but also the relative intensity of blue light can make a difference? e.g. spectrum which are lacking in other colours could cause more damage than a balanced spectrum?

and

2. Assume that 1) is true, in that case, what kindof display would you expect to be more damaging, traditionaly LCDs, or OLEDs? As OLEDs tend to have much sharper "peaks" in light intensity, due to how they work, but also a lower absolute emission of blue light. An OLED spectrum might look like diagram 2, whereas an LCD spectrum might look like this.

I'm sure this is a topic that gets talked about a lot so apologies if any of this is re-hashing obvious stuff

f.lux's defaults are set to do a lot more for people with big bright screens (like desktops).

With a majority of LED backlights today showing essentially no flicker when they dim (see https://www.notebookcheck.net/PWM-Ranking-Notebooks-Smartphones-and-Tablets-with-PWM.163979.0.html), we don't think this is for everyone, as it has an impact on contrast and power usage. But with a display with bad flicker, it's absolutely a good way to do it.

Hue v1 maxes out its melanopic content in the mid-4000K range because it employs the most "chips" and the illuminance is somewhat higher as a result.

The tubes are likely more directional and would probably be better. Many ad-hoc lightboxes were built like this. But also there are reasonable light therapy panels online for $50 that will make this amount of light to, though some of them have to be used very close to the eye as well.

Don't forget to diffuse the light - staring at any of these lights directly for 30m can be quite painful.

It would be wrong to say it's a psychological trick or a thing that only involves sleep or a little suggestion, it's actually pretty fundamental to our biology and we want more people to know about it.

Here is a paper that explains how half the proteins in the body are rhythmic based on when your eyes see light - the truth is that your body has billions of clocks, and they're everywher. In some ways, you can choose to have them work well or not, by giving them a strong day-night signal. This is the way immunity, digestion, repair are regulated by the body, and why timing of light is so important.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1408886111

• Allowing the sunrise color slider to be left of the bedtime one, so I can have two levels of blues at night
• Adding even deeper blues, as it seems like I could take far deeper blues than what is in the wider gamut mode

Your reply somewhat supports what I was suspecting -- that what I actually need might be more like the 'Inverse' of the Ease of Use and Accessibility filters.

I will go and look at the resources that you've pointed to.

Thanks,

I'm a satisfied user of f.lux, but this is really a question about color filtering in general -- and I'm guessing this is a forum where such knowledge is fairly common.

If I am creating content (eg. PowerPoint slides, or a Website) and I would like to confirm that it will be viewable by persons who suffer from unusual color vision (i.e. color blindness, in its various forms) -- If I create the content and then cycle through the various color filter options in the Windows 10 'Ease of Use' or 'Accessability' settings, and the content is clearly viewable under all conditions am I 'good to go'? Or doing I need to somehow do something like the 'inverse' of the Accessability settings?

Thanks,
--- Hans Ziegler

Hi - from a color perspective, on our PC build at least - you can do "use wider slider ranges" and get more "blue" than normal during the day.

I should mention that the way we do this is by removing green and red, and so while there is more blue in a relative sense, it is hard to increase it overall. So this might not work as well as seeing more actual blue skies. But you are welcome to try.

I'll be following !

Our reasoning is that people tend to experience a circadian delay from weekend sleep (likely from sleeping in and not seeing light in the morning), but we didn't necessarily want to make Mondays even worse by pushing them later using a screen. So we have tried to keep things on a more consistent schedule.

We also have a custom version (not public) that has 7 day of week scheduling and things like this but it's more for people who do rotating shift work, not people who want to wake up at the same time on Friday and Monday.