Radiance

Digital vibrance, colour and display control for Windows

An original WinForms app with a custom-drawn interface and a fully local feature set.
No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud dependencies.

📸 View Theme & Page Gallery (Dark vs Light)

Dark Theme	Light Theme
Vibrance	Vibrance (Light)
Crosshair	Crosshair (Light)
Monitor Settings	Monitor (Light)
Hardware DDC/CI	Hardware (Light)

Vibrance

• NVIDIA digital vibrance through the driver (NVAPI DVC), applied to every display
• Saturation, gamma, brightness, contrast and colour temperature
• Display / Phone / Live tabs
• Colour balance – hue rotation plus red/green/blue gain
• Levels – shadows, blacks, whites, highlights, shadow tint, highlight tint
• Colour vision – simulate red/green/blue weakness, or correct for it (true per-pixel LMS)
• Per-pixel colour – optional D3D11 overlay: saturation up to 300 and colour-vision matrices applied to every pixel, on every monitor (one swap chain per output), not approximated through the gamma ramp
• Share codes – copy the whole look as RDC-…, paste one back (checksummed, all 20 colour fields)
• Eye care – warmth, screen dimming, or off
• Compare – flip back to neutral and return
• Colour screenshots – the active look is baked into the PNG, so the file matches the screen
• Reset to neutral

Crosshair

• Click-through, always-on-top overlay that never takes focus
• Per-arm toggles, diagonal arms, adjustable outline thickness
• Design gallery – 18 named designs across Cross, Dot, Circle, Other and Colour families
• Five shapes: cross, dot, circle, T, X
• Arm length, thickness, centre gap, opacity
• Colour wheel – HSV wheel with brightness bar and hex entry
• Centre dot, black outline
• Share codes – RDCX-…

Monitor

• Every attached display with its current mode
• Resolution and refresh-rate list, applied through ChangeDisplaySettingsEx
• Scaling – default, stretch, aspect and centred
• Custom resolution – width, height and refresh, with an NVAPI timing override when Windows refuses the mode
• HDR – read state per display and turn it on or off
• Share codes – RDCM-…

Monitor hardware (DDC/CI)

• Hardware brightness, contrast and RGB gain
• Input-source switching
• Reports when a monitor refuses DDC/CI instead of pretending it worked

Profiles

• Save the whole colour state as a named look
• Apply and delete profiles
• Game detection from your Steam and Epic libraries (local manifests only)
• Bind a profile to a game and have it apply automatically while the game runs

Library

• Built-in starting presets: Neutral, Competitive, Vivid, Night, Cinematic, Eye comfort

Customize

• Taskbar alignment, widgets button, Task View button, search mode
• Show file extensions, show hidden files
• Apply, or apply and restart Explorer

Settings

• Light and dark themes (verified at runtime; the whole window repaints)
• Start with Windows (launches silently in system tray), start minimised, minimise to tray
• Hotkey picker – click, press a combination, conflict checked against Windows and other apps before it is accepted
• Theme from an image – build a palette from a wallpaper
• Audio limiter – caps system volume at a chosen maximum
• Quick popup – hotkey-triggered vibrance slider that floats over everything
• Update check against GitHub releases
• Open settings folder, reset all settings

Phone remote

• Local web server: open the address on any phone on the same network
• Vibrance slider and a light/dark theme switch
• Random token in the URL is the only access control; nothing leaves the LAN
• No cloud, no account

Discord presence

• Rich presence over Discord's local IPC pipe, on by default with the built-in application id
• Reconnects automatically if Discord starts later, and updates the activity when you change look

Shared presets

• Any look file in %APPDATA%\Radiance\shared, imported or exported from the Library
• Accepts .radiance-look, .json, or a raw RDC-… code

Diagnostics

• One click (or Radiance.exe --report) writes a local zip: system, displays, settings, shader state
• Never uploaded

Everywhere

• App mark (taskbar, tray, title bar) generated from Assets/radiance.png
• Themed scrollbars and mouse-wheel paging on every page
• Tray icon with open, reset colours, turn off per-pixel colour, and exit
• Single instance
• Three-step first-run onboarding with a live vibrance preview

• Windows 10 or 11, x64
• .NET 8 (or use the self-contained publish below)
• An NVIDIA GPU for digital vibrance; the rest works on any GPU

dotnet build Radiance.slnx -c Release

dotnet publish src/Radiance/Radiance.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true \
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=false -p:DebugType=none

Radiance.exe --report       write a diagnostics zip to the Desktop and exit
Radiance.exe --shared       list shared presets
Radiance.exe --screenshot   save a colour-baked screenshot and exit
Radiance.exe --discord      test the Discord pipe and print the result
Radiance.exe --gpu          report NVIDIA availability, display count and current vibrance
Radiance.exe --monitors     list physical monitors, DDC/CI support and HDR state
Radiance.exe --audio        print the current master volume

Everything is local, in %APPDATA%\Radiance\:

• settings.json – colour state, theme, hotkeys, crosshair, customizations
• profiles.json – saved looks
• games.json – game-to-profile bindings

Delete those files to reset the app.

All branding lives in Branding.cs: name, tagline, version, the GitHub repo used by the updater, and the settings folder. Change it there and every surface follows.

src/Radiance/
  Branding.cs           name, version, data folder, update feed
  Theme.cs              palettes, fonts, drawing helpers
  AppSettings.cs        persisted settings, hotkey and crosshair models
  Program.cs            entry point, single instance
  Core/
    ColorPipeline.cs    settings -> hardware writes
    ToneState.cs        gamma, gain, blacks, highlights
    NvidiaVibrance.cs   NVAPI digital vibrance
    GammaRamp.cs        gamma / brightness / contrast / temperature
    ColourVision.cs     LMS matrices for simulate/correct
    ShaderOverlay.cs    D3D11 desktop-duplication overlay + 5x5 matrix
    CustomTiming.cs     NVAPI custom resolution timings
    AudioLimiter.cs     Core Audio master-volume cap
    ColourScreenshot.cs screenshot with the look baked in
    PhoneRemote.cs      local web server for phone control
    DiscordPresence.cs  Discord IPC rich presence
    SharedPresets.cs    local shared-look folder
    Diagnostics.cs      local support bundle
    ThemeFromImage.cs   palette derived from a wallpaper
    DisplayService.cs   monitors, modes, scaling, custom resolution
    MonitorHardware.cs  DDC/CI brightness, contrast, gain, input
    Hdr.cs              HDR state via DisplayConfig
    Profiles.cs         profile model, store and built-ins
    CrosshairDesigns.cs gallery designs
    ShareCodes.cs       RDC- / RDCX- codes
    Games.cs            Steam/Epic detection, game-to-profile map
    HotkeyManager.cs    global hotkeys
    Screenshot.cs       PNG capture
    CustomizeRegistry.cs taskbar and Explorer tweaks
    Updater.cs          GitHub release check
  UI/
    ShellForm.cs        window chrome, sidebar, header, navigation
    UiKit.cs            card, slider, toggle, segmented, list row, nav
    ColourWheel.cs      HSV wheel + brightness bar + hex
    HotkeyPicker.cs     capture with conflict detection
    DesignGallery.cs    crosshair design tiles
    QuickPopup.cs       floating vibrance slider
    TrayIcon.cs         tray presence
    CrosshairOverlay.cs click-through overlay
    OnboardingForm.cs   first-run welcome
    Pages/              one file per screen

Digital vibrance is written per display with SetDVCLevelEx; 50 is the driver default and 100 is maximum, so saturation scales the driver value (saturation 150 at vibrance 60 writes 90). The tone controls build a 256-entry ramp and push it with SetDeviceGammaRamp, which some HDR displays ignore.

The D3D11 overlay replaces what you see, so a crash while it is running could leave the screen colour-shifted. Three guards exist:

• a marker file is written while it runs; an unclean exit disables it on next start
• a test hook (RADIANCE_SHADER_TEST=1) is capped at 120 seconds
• the tray menu has Turn off per-pixel colour

MIT – see LICENSE.

libs/NvAPIWrapper.dll is the NvAPIWrapper managed wrapper for NVIDIA's NVAPI (MIT).