PGari Glowee: Mac brightness with window spotlight

Screen record on a Mac so your viewers know which window to watch

Short answer: Everything you need to screen record on a Mac ships with the machine: Shift-Command-5 opens the Screenshot app, you pick Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion, and you click Record. Nothing has to be installed. What the finished file shows is the difficulty — a full-screen capture carries your notes, your chat, your calendar and every other open window, sitting alongside the one you were actually discussing. That is the part PGari Glowee handles. Its Spotlight lowers everything except the window you are in, on any Mac display, and since the dimming is painted onto the screen it survives into a screen recording and into a shared screen. Glowee records nothing at all; the recording is macOS's work.

What viewers see when you screen record on a Mac with Glowee's Spotlight on: one window at normal brightness, the rest of the screen dimmed, and a recording indicator

One word of warning about the word itself. Apple also calls its app-and-file search Spotlight, opened at Command-Space bar. This page is about something completely different: a lighting effect for the benefit of whoever is watching.

Screen record on a Mac with the built-in tools

Apple's own sequence for the Screenshot app.

Press Shift-Command-5. A toolbar appears on the screen.
Pick what to record. Either Record Entire Screen, or Record Selected Portion — drag that selection’s borders to resize it. macOS Tahoe 26 and later adds Record Selected Window to the row.
Go into Options first. Nominate a microphone if your voice should be on the track. Show Mouse Clicks puts a black circle around the pointer at every click. A timer is available, the save location can be changed — the desktop is where files land by default — and on macOS Tahoe 26 and later the capture format, SDR or HDR, is yours to pick.
Click Record.
Finish by clicking Stop up in the menu bar, or by pressing Command-Control-Esc.

What you get is a .mov file whose name opens with "Screen Recording" and carries the date and time. Click the thumbnail as it appears in the corner and you can trim the recording immediately.

QuickTime Player is the alternative starting point: File > New Screen Recording, or Control-Command-N.

Two limits are worth knowing before you build a lesson around any of this. Apple notes that certain apps, the Apple TV app among them, may refuse to have their windows recorded. And capturing the Mac's own system audio is listed as an option from macOS 27 Golden Gate onwards, so on anything older the audio track is your microphone rather than what the Mac is playing.

Put a spotlight on the window you are explaining

A recorded lesson, a client walkthrough or a tutorial for YouTube almost always revolves around a single window — the spreadsheet, the editor, the browser tab, the dashboard. Everything else on the desktop remains inside the frame, and your audience is left to work out for themselves which part is the point.

Spotlight lowers everything except the window you are in.

Throw it from the sun in the menu bar, or with ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S wherever you are. The same chord clears it, so you can change your mind mid-recording without opening a menu.
Pick the strength: Off, Soft or Strong, according to how cluttered the screen is. It returns at whichever level you last used.
Click into another window and the light goes with it. Nothing needs re-aiming as you move between the slide and the browser and back.
Fix it in place with Pinned, so a stray click cannot drag the light off mid-take.
Every Mac display qualifies, XDR or otherwise, internal or external. A MacBook Air is perfectly fine.

Because Spotlight is painted on the screen, a screenshot or a screen recording carries it exactly as it carries any window. Nothing has to be masked afterwards in the edit — which is where the time genuinely goes when you are cutting a batch of lessons in one evening.

Capture the whole screen, or a portion — not one window

What Spotlight alters is the area around your window, so it can only reach a recording that contains that area. Record the entire screen, or draw a selected portion wide enough to include the dimmed surround.

The brightness boost never reaches the file

Extra Brightness, Glowee's other feature, carries an XDR display past the macOS slider. Captures leave it out, so a recording made on a boosted panel plays back looking entirely normal to whoever watches. It is there for your eyes and contributes nothing to your viewers', and it needs an XDR or other EDR display — a 14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2021 onwards, for instance. That side of the app is covered in the MacBook Pro brightness guide. Spotlight is the half your audience actually sees.

In a class, a meeting or on a projector

The same logic holds for live sharing. Leave your slides in an ordinary window instead of full screen, share the screen, and throw Spotlight. The notes, the chat and the desktop behind the window all drop back, so the room tracks the slide rather than your notifications.

Teaching online, that is the gap between "the one on the left, no, the other left" and a class that simply looks where you are looking. It earns its keep, too, when you are demonstrating late in the evening to a team in another country and half of them are watching on a phone: a dimmed background survives a small screen and a thin connection far better than a pointer does.

macOS contributes here as well. Show Notifications: when mirroring or sharing the display, in System Settings → Notifications, lets you pause notifications — Apple's own illustration is doing exactly that during a presentation. And on an Apple silicon Mac running macOS Sonoma 14 or later, Presenter Overlay can put you on top of the screen you are sharing on a video call. Both belong to macOS, not to Glowee.

Recording and sharing behave alike here: the dimming lives in the surround, so whatever you share has to include that surround — share the screen, not a single window.

A spotlight on a window, or a spotlight on the pointer

Several Mac apps aimed at presenters use the word spotlight for quite different things. Each line below is that app's own account of itself, from its own site.

Tool	What it does, according to its own site
macOS Screenshot	Show Mouse Clicks draws a black circle around the pointer when you click
Mouseposé (Boinx)	Dims the screen and shines a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer; makes keystrokes visible; highlights mouse clicks
Presentify	Annotate the screen, draw on a whiteboard, highlight the cursor, spotlight or zoom in on key areas
Scribbble	Draw on top of any app with a hotkey; its Spotlight dims everything except a circle around the cursor; magnify and zoom
Screen Studio	A macOS screen recorder that automatically zooms in on the cursor, enlarges it and smooths its movement
PGari Glowee	Dims everything except the window you are in; the light follows when you click another window

What Glowee lifts out is a window. The pointer goes unmarked, nothing is drawn, nothing is zoomed and nothing is recorded. Where an audience has to follow one button or one line of code, a pointer tool or an annotation tool is the right purchase. Where they have to stay with one window while you work inside it, a window spotlight is. The questions are different, and anyone producing tutorials may well end up owning one of each. On the window side there is more in highlighting the active window and in dimming inactive windows.

Questions readers send in

What is the shortcut to screen record on a Mac?

Shift-Command-5 brings up the Screenshot tools; choose what to record there and click Record. Command-Control-Esc ends the recording. Starting from QuickTime Player instead, the chord is Control-Command-N.

Can my voice go onto the screen recording?

You can. Open Options in the Screenshot toolbar and nominate a microphone before clicking Record. System audio is a separate option, which Apple lists for macOS 27 Golden Gate and later.

Will Spotlight show in my screen recording or shared screen?

It will. Spotlight is an on-screen layer, so a screenshot or a screen recording captures it the way it captures any window. Extra Brightness is the exception — captures leave it out.

What does Spotlight do on a Mac?

The name covers two unrelated things. Apple's Spotlight is the search at Command-Space bar. Glowee's Spotlight is a dimming effect, under which everything but your current window steps back.

How to turn off spotlight effect mac Press ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S, or set Spotlight to Off in Glowee's menu. Quitting the app returns the display to normal in any case.

Does it need a MacBook Pro?

No. Any display at all will take Spotlight, which is nothing more than dimming. Extra Brightness is the one feature that insists on an XDR or other EDR panel.

Can I test it before paying?

Yes. Seven days, every feature open, no account and no card. After that it is a one-time purchase — one Mac, or three Macs on one key, with a 30-day refund.

Try it on your next recording

PGari Glowee is a single menu bar app under 2 MB, built for macOS 13 or later and universal across Apple silicon and Intel. No kernel extension is installed and no background helper is left running.

Download the 7-day trial See how Glowee works