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source_hash: cf56db6a2db3069a8a5d589aa9320826862e3720a2d3f3bb5c1553e8b148fddf
post: /posts/tools-and-plugins/shade
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# Context Pack: Shade_

Reference for the rewritten June 2026 account. Keep the literal product name Shade_, including the underscore. This is a personal reading-comfort and design account, not a clinical efficacy claim or a fresh application audit. The essay is the product explanation at /documents/tools-and-plugins/shade.

## Verbatim excerpts

> Passthrough removes **Shade_'s** contribution.

> It can darken the composite while leaving the underlying document or footage unchanged.

> The original essay called it a guaranteed-honest window. That claim was too broad.

## Use case and feature boundary

Ari reports dyslexia, difficulty with white screens during long days and a tint that helps her read. The Hue overlay is the founding feature. She works nights and also shoots/edits/grades; the 2am white timeline leads into her personal overcompensation example: a warm view prompts cooling the grade until the export appears too blue elsewhere.

The described macOS product uses click-through overlay windows. Passthrough excludes chosen windows from that overlay and tracks their moves/resizes. It does not cancel Night Shift, calibrate the screen, correct profiles or remove ambient effects. Do not promise true or guaranteed-honest colour.

Source-over is alpha compositing, not additive-only light. A translucent black layer over an opaque background can lower displayed colour values. This changes the rendered composite, not the source image. The demo's dim control does this. Neither overlay nor Passthrough is a grading/calibration engine.

The June architecture says the overlay does not read underlying pixels and therefore that path needs no Screen Recording permission; do not generalise this into a fresh audit of all permissions. Its separate captured-pixel transform experiment reportedly worked in the lab but was dev-gated/off by default because capture could recurse into its own output. At that time the overlay was the product and the transform was research; an overlay can already dim.

Other features: manual local-time schedule crossing midnight, launch at login and arbitrary-colour Hue overlay. Free/open-source/MIT/signed/notarised are historical release claims. No newly inspected macOS application is supplied here.

## Browser illustration

Source: apps/web/components/shade/ShadeWriteupDemo.tsx. It changes browser overlay state and preserves interactivity; it does not install/test the Mac app. Controls: Hue 0–360, Strength 0–70%, Dim 0–70%; defaults 36/32/20, enabled and Passthrough initially true. Reset restores those values. Passthrough puts the sample above this demo's layer, not outside the user's display settings.

Six retained CSS swatches: Skin #e0a487, Sky #4f9fe0, Foliage #5a9e54, Red #d23b34, Teal #2bb6a8, Neutral #9a9a9a. Tint is hsla(hue,85%,55%,strength/100), dim is an inset black shadow with dim/100 opacity when enabled. Test IDs: shade-page-overlay and shade-passthrough-sample. No claim of colour accuracy follows from the hex values.

The three missing /shade PNGs were not recovered and each returned 404 publicly. The body now supplies labelled ASCII explanations for late-night brightness, grade overcompensation and an overlay exclusion. Do not claim the original image assets or a ShadeWindow.tsx sibling exist.

## Primary references

- Compositing: https://www.w3.org/TR/compositing-1/#simplealphacompositing
- Night Shift: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl97bc676d/mac