If you use a Windows 11 laptop, you may have noticed that the screen constantly changes brightness on its own, even if you are sitting in a perfectly lit room and haven’t touched the brightness keys. Worse, the screen seems to dim when you are looking at a dark web page and suddenly gets blindingly bright when you open a white Word document.
This frustrating behaviour is caused by a feature called “Content Adaptive Brightness Control” (CABC). It is designed to save battery by dynamically adjusting the backlight based on the colours currently displayed on your screen. If you edit photos, watch movies, or simply hate your screen flickering every time you switch tabs, you can disable this feature entirely.
How to Disable Content Adaptive Brightness Control
You can turn off CABC directly from the Windows 11 Display settings.
- Click the Start button and select the Settings gear icon (or press Windows Key + I on your keyboard).
- In the left-hand navigation pane, click on System.
- In the main window on the right, click on Display.
- Under the “Brightness & colour” section, locate the Brightness slider.
- Click the small arrow next to the Brightness slider to expand the hidden options menu.
- Look for a drop-down menu labelled Change brightness based on content (or a checkbox labelled “Help improve battery by optimising the content shown and brightness”).
- Click the drop-down menu and change the setting to Off. (Alternatively, uncheck the box if your version uses a checkbox).
The change is instantaneous. Your screen will no longer randomly fluctuate based on the colours of the applications you are running. The brightness will remain perfectly locked to whatever level you set it to using your keyboard shortcuts or the Action Center slider.