By default, your iPad is set to automatically change its display brightness, thanks to a built-in light sensor, depending on ambient light - note that this has nothing to do with the automatic dimming of the screen that occurs when the iPad is trying to save some battery after a few moments of inactivity. While this option is often practical, and typically makes your battery last longer on a charge, it can also be quite distracting, which is why Apple lets you disable this Auto-Brightness and prevent your iPad from automatically changing the screen's brightness, as you'll learn in this tutorial.
Turn off the automatic brightness change on iPad
Follow these steps to disable this feature:
If needed, click on the "Home" button to return to your Home screen.- Then, flick left or right until you see the "Settings" icon, and tap on it.
- When the iPad Settings screen opens, tap on the "Brightness and Wallpaper" category on the left.
- Notice that you have at the top the brightness slider we explained in our "Manually change your iPad's screen brightness" tutorial. Underneath, you will find a "Auto-Brightness" On/Off switch.
- Tap the switch to turn on or turn off Auto-Brightness setting, and the change will take effect immediately. (Tip: if unclear, the word that currently appears on the switch is the current state - if you see the word "OFF", it means that Auto-Brightness is currently disabled - not that you need to tap to disable it.)
- From this point on, the brightness of your iPad will be the one you set manually, and will not change without your intervention - some apps let you change the brightness from within the application itself, so sometimes, no trip to the global iPad settings will be required.
- This is all it takes to disable the Auto-Brightness preference on your iPad!
Tip: if you decide that you want to re-enable the Auto-Brightness option later on, just follow the steps outlined above, but this time set the switch to "ON".
Tip # 2, concerning the inactivity auto dimming of the screen: as mentioned earlier, your iPad will try to conserve battery life by automatically dimming the screen (make it less bright) after a certain period of inactivity - just tap anywhere on screen to bring the display back to its normal brightness. If you have a keyboard plugged into your iPad, just hit a neutral key (like Control), and the screen will "wake up".