Vivid is a new app that doubles your Mac's display brightness system-wide

Vivid On Mac Lifestyle (Image credit: Jordi Bruin)

What you need to know

Vivid is a new Mac app for increasing the brightness of your Mac's display.
Both the Pro Display XDR and modern MacBook Pro are capable of displaying brighter images than they normally do.
Vivid offers a split-screen mode to show the change in brightness.

If you own a modern MacBook Pro or a Pro Display XDR, your display can show images in a much brighter fashion than you're seeing — and Vivid is the app you need to fix all of that.

Vivid is designed to work with the MacBook Pro and Pro Display XDR, two devices that are capable of displaying HDR content at 1,000 nits or more. However, for the most part, they sit at just 500 nits which means you're missing out on all of that brightness. Vivid is a new Mac app that unlocks that additional light, making your Mac's display brighter across the board — not just in apps that display HDR content or are using Metal.

Vivid uses standard Apple APIs to make all of this work and even features a split-screen mode that will show you how your display would look with Vivid enabled and disabled simultaneously. You can see that in the video below — the difference really is striking.

Vivid allows users to double the brightness of their MacBook Pro and Pro Display XDR, system-wide!The new MacBook Pros and the Pro Display XDR have displays that can go up to 1.600 nits of brightness. By default these levels of brightness can only be reached when watching HDR videos or by using Metal applications. Until now.

Users of MacBook Pro and Pro Display XDR hardware can purchase a lifetime license code for Vivid for just €15 (or local equivalent) right now and that could be money well spent if your workflow can benefit from some additional brightness system-wide.

Those interested can learn more about Vivid on the app's website — that's where you'll go to buy, too.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.