New iPhone Red Screen Tint in iOS 10 to Preserve Night Vision

This new iOS 10 feature lets you filter your iPhone screen with different color tints. A red tint throughout the entire phone is a quick trick for astronomy and stargazing to preserve dark vision. Previously, individual astronomy and stargazing apps would let you tint the screen red for night mode, but now you can change the tint of the entire phone with a red filter using accessibility features that are brand new in the latest iOS update.

Red color tint accessibility feature in iOS 10

I'd love to show you a screenshot of the new feature, but it's actually a color overlay so the screenshots show up the original colors. This makes sense, because that's the only way it could work across all different apps without adjusting each individual app features. This also means that it's not necessarily optimized for all of the apps you might use, but it's a quick and dirty trick to make everything tinted red.

Go to General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Color Filters > Color Tint

General: Accessibility: Display Accommodations

Display Accommodations: Color Filters

Color Filters: Color Tint: Hue all the way to the right: Intensity all the way to the right

Similar apps are available for Android devices, but like I said iOS apps were limited to the ones that already included a 'night mode' such as StarWalk.

Night Mode was already available within certain apps, such as StarWalk.

Previously, iPhone users would get an evil glare if they pulled out their phone during a star party, camping trip, or meteor shower - even with the brightness turned all the way down, when your eyes are dilated the screen still appears rather bright. I'd suggest turning the brightness down AND tinting everything red just in case.

Items that were previously red might disappear completely!

You can see that it is a quick and dirty option and can actually make items disappear if they are normally red, like all the little badge icons. Oh well! Neat trick, I'll have to try it out sometime. The nice thing is that it lets you use red filter through the entire phone and not just in some apps. I know sometimes it's nice to just whip out the calculator or something while I'm observing, which involves leaving the apps that have red modes built in. 

Shout out to xt8dob on Instagram for tipping me off to this new trick!

Thanks to TristanZamboni for putting me onto this. Red screen mode is available in iOS 10 under Accessibility/Color Filters. #astronomy #nightvision #redlight #ios10

A photo posted by Coy (@xt8dob) on Sep 13, 2016 at 6:48pm PDT