Add a fine grain texture over your Mac screen

How to turn it on

Use the Soft Screen toggle in the menu bar, or the Soft Screen card on the Features tab. Whether it is on or off is saved and restored when Phosphor launches.

What you can change

• Texture intensity: 0 to 25%. The default is 15%.
• Dragging the intensity to 0 is the same as turning Soft Screen off.

What the overlay does

The overlay is a grayscale grain, built from a 256 by 256 pixel tile of random gray values. It is drawn sharp, one texture pixel for each screen pixel, and it is static: it does not move or flicker.

The intensity setting is the strength of that grain over what is on screen. There is no color or temperature shift. If you want to change colors, Color Grading is the tool for that. The pattern is generated randomly each time Phosphor starts.

Hotkey

None. Soft Screen is switched from the menu bar or its card.

Permissions

None.

Good to know

• There is one overlay window for each connected display, kept in step as displays connect and disconnect, so the grain covers every display.
• The overlay ignores mouse clicks, and it stays above your windows on every Space.
• Free, and part of Phosphor for Mac at no cost. It needs macOS 13 or later.