My monitor is more than an arm's length away from me, so adjusting its backlight brightness is quite inconvenient.
Is there a way in Windows to adjust the backlight using the keyboard and/or mouse only. If so, how?
Windows – How to Adjust Monitor’s Backlight Brightness
backlightbrightnessdisplaywindows
Related Solutions
Perhaps Stardock's Windowblinds can help you? I'm pretty sure that it can do window color adjustments (not just border and decoration). Although I was never actually able to use it (this was a long time ago on a very old computer), I do seem to remember options relating to individual window colors.
iBrightness might be what you're looking for:
Of course there are various other apps (although perhaps not providing direct access via a popup) that are progressively ugly in terms of UI, such as Display Tuner, ScreenBright, Desktop Lighter...
You can also create shortcuts with keyboard shortcuts to NirCmd, and in the Target field specify parameters such as
changebrightness <level>(where level can be +ve or -ve). The following commands will even automate the creation of the shortcuts for you (edit as required):nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "~$folder.desktop$" "Decrease Brightness" "Ctrl+Alt+F9" changebrightness -10 nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "~$folder.desktop$" "Increase Brightness" "Ctrl+Alt+F10" changebrightness 10
Best Answer
Update - 2015-10-30
ScreenBright seems discontinued, but as @wrongusername suggested, pangobright might be an alternative.
The solution I am using right now
I found
enable DDC/CIoption in my displays' settings. The ScreenBright program was able to modify it, although I think it's GUI is quite terrible and easy to break you custom settings. My screens also flicker a lot when changing brightness. Nevertheless, it has a commandline interface, which is much better. Especially when you create your own GUI (which is around 5 minutes in C#) or use plain Windows shortcuts.Old setup
As a side note to the Dell brightness change - I can confirm that it also did work for me. My setup was:
The laptop itself had a built-in GPU (Intel HD2500). In its software there was a tab called "monitor settings", iirc. It did indeed communicate with the displays and somehow change their built-in brightness settings. I weren't able to do much more (change profiles, for example), and it took quite a while to "initialize". There was also a 2-3 second delay between the setting of the brightness and actual change. I guess it was mostly due to the screens, which changed brightness gradually.
I've updated my PC to the regular workstation, and unfortunately I wasn't able to find similar setting in the NVidia control panel.
EDIT: It seems that my previous setup used DDC.