The Emergency Light effect fills your entire screen with flat, even light at a brightness and color you control. There's no gradient and no animation — point the screen at what you need to see and it works like a large, flat flashlight.
Before you start
- A charged device. This effect is only as good as whatever battery is left in your phone, tablet, or laptop — check your charge level before you rely on it for a whole outage.
- Something to prop the screen against. A book, a shelf edge, or a stand keeps the light aimed steadily where you need it instead of in your hand, which frees you up to do whatever else you need to do in the dark.
- Realistic expectations. A screen makes a genuinely useful backup light, but a dedicated flashlight lasts far longer on its own batteries and doesn't depend on a charged phone — worth keeping one around for anything longer than a quick need.
Set it up
- Open the Emergency Light effect on the device you want to use as your light.
- Set Brightness to 100 for maximum output, or lower if you want to conserve battery for a longer outage.
- Select Go Fullscreen so the fill takes over the whole screen with no page layout or browser tabs around it.
- Point or prop the screen toward what you need lit — directly at a task, or angled off a wall or ceiling to spread the light across a room.
You'll know it worked when the screen is a solid, even white edge to edge. The on-screen buttons fade out on their own after about five seconds if you leave the mouse alone.
What each control does
| Control | Range | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brightness | 10–100 | 80 | How much light the screen puts out, and how much battery it draws. 100 is the brightest and the fastest to drain a battery; lower values trade some light output for longer runtime. |
| Color | Any color | White | The color of the fill. White gives you the most usable light and the truest colors on whatever you're looking at. Red is the one worth knowing about — it lets your eyes stay adapted to the dark, so you can still see around the room after you look away. |
This effect uses a plain color swatch rather than the named Color Temperature presets (Daylight, Tungsten, and so on) that most other effects have. Set Brightness to 100 and leave the color on white unless you have a specific reason not to.
Common setups
- Lighting a whole room, not just your hands. Prop the screen facing a white wall or ceiling instead of pointing it straight out. Bounced light spreads much wider than a direct beam and stops the glare of staring straight at a bright screen.
- Reading or working close up. Brightness 70–90, screen laid flat or propped a foot or two from what you're doing. Full 100 this close is often more glare than help.
- Stretching a low battery through a longer outage. Brightness 30–50 with the screen propped rather than held. It's noticeably dimmer than full output but still far more usable than nothing, and it buys you meaningfully more time before the device dies.
- Making yourself visible, not lighting a task. Full brightness, screen facing outward in a window or doorway. A steady bright rectangle is easy to spot from outside, though for structured signaling — flashing a message rather than just staying visible — Morse Code Light is built for exactly that.
Troubleshooting
The screen keeps dimming or locking while I'm using it. That's your device's own screen lock or sleep timer, not this effect — WebLight has no way to override it. Go into your phone or laptop's display settings and turn off auto-lock, or extend the sleep timeout, before you need the light.
Battery is draining much faster than normal. A screen at full white brightness is one of the most power-hungry things a device does, and it's especially costly on OLED displays where a solid white fill lights up every pixel at once. Lower Brightness a step or two if you don't need maximum output, and turn the screen off between uses rather than leaving it lit continuously.
The light is too harsh pointed at my face or hands. Aim it at a wall or ceiling instead of straight at what you're doing. Bounced light is softer and covers more of a room than a direct beam, and it's easier on your eyes than staring into a bright screen.
I changed the color and now there's much less usable light. Saturated colors put out far less light than white at the same Brightness, because only part of each pixel is lit. If you switched to red for night vision and now can't see well enough, that's the trade — go back to white when you actually need to see detail, and save red for moving around a dark room.
I can't tell if this will work when I actually lose power. Test it now, while you have a charge and a connection, rather than finding out during an outage. Open the effect, confirm it loads and lights up, and note where you keep the device charged.
The light isn't bright enough even at full Brightness. 100 is the ceiling for this effect — there's no boost beyond it. Move the screen closer to what you're lighting, or bounce it off a nearby wall or ceiling to make better use of the light you have.
Next steps
For a flashing, on-off signal instead of steady light, see Morse Code Light. For the same flat fill with named color temperature presets rather than a freeform swatch — useful when you want a specific warmth rather than just light — Full Screen Light covers that.