Save your eyesight and disable temporal dithering on your Mac with Stillcolor, a lightweight menu bar app for macOS running on Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3.
Heaps of people are sensitive to temporal dithering which alternates pixel colors at the speed of your display's refresh rate, causing eyestrain and various other symptoms.
Stillcolor activates on login and whenever a new display connects.
- Apple Silicon e.g. M1/M2/M3
- macOS >= 13
Tested on macOS 14 with M2 and M3 Max.
Head over to Releases and download the latest zip. Unzip Stillcolor.app to your Applications folder and launch.
Select “Launch a login” to make this app run automatically and disable dithering whenever your computer starts.
To check wether the app did the job, run the following in Terminal:
ioreg -lw0 | grep -i enableDither
Should see 1 or more ”enableDither” = No corresponding to each live or past display.
To re-enable dithering simply uncheck “Disable Dithering.”
enableDither is reset back to Yes on computer restart that's why you need to launch this app on login.
To verify that your GPU is not applying dithering you can try a visual test by visiting Lagom LCD Gradient (banding) test
Set your built-in display’s color profile to sRGB at full brightness and look carefully at the gray parts, you should be able to see subtle banding when you disable dithering which happens in realtime.
And if you're sensitive to temporal dithering you should notice a lot less eyestrain while dithering is disabled.
A more complicated approach is to use a video capture card and record your display's uncompressed output then run the recording through ffmpeg to visualize dithering with something like the following command:
ffmpeg -i input.mov -sws_flags full_chroma_int+bitexact+accurate_rnd -vf "format=gbrp,tblend=all_mode=grainextract,eq=contrast=-60" -c:v v210 -pix_fmt yuv422p10le diff.mov
- Make this app compatible macOS 11+
- Test and verify various Macs M1 Pro, Max, etc
- Make it work with Intel Macs?
- Create a foolproof and easy dithering test
- iOS?