About MaxCandela

MaxCandela exists to answer one simple frustration: your MacBook Pro’s screen is capable of far more brightness than macOS lets you use. The panel in a 14″ or 16″ MacBook Pro is rated for 1,000 nits of sustained brightness — but everyday content is capped at roughly 600. The rest is reserved for HDR video, and most of the time it just sits there, unused.

We built MaxCandela to hand that reserve back to you. One click in the menu bar, and your whole screen — every app, every window — steps up into the brightness your hardware always had.

The name

A candela is the scientific unit of luminous intensity. MaxCandela does exactly what it says: takes your display to its maximum candelas.

The Mac app

A tiny menu-bar utility for macOS 15.6+. It engages the display’s Extended Dynamic Range (EDR) headroom — the same mechanism macOS uses for HDR movies — and lifts all your content into it with a color-calibrated transform, so everything gets brighter without washing out. It respects the system’s thermal and battery limits at all times, collects no personal data, and never sees what’s on your screen. Free for 5 days, then $9.99 once or $0.99/month.

This website

The site doubles as a live demo: the “Try the boost” button on the home page performs the same brightness trick inside your browser using an HDR video layer — no install required. It brightens the pages of this site only; the Mac app is what brightens everything else. If the button is disabled, your current display or browser has no HDR headroom to unlock.

Our principles

• Honest engineering. We never push the panel past what macOS itself allows — no hacks that fight the operating system’s safety limits.
• Minimal data.No accounts, no personal data, no screen access — the app never sees what you’re looking at. The only thing collected is a handful of anonymous usage stats, exactly as our privacy policy spells out.
• Instant reversibility. Toggling off — or simply quitting the app — returns your display to exactly its previous state, always.

Get in touch

Questions, problems, ideas? Head to the Support page — we read everything.