PGari Glowee: Mac brightness with window spotlight

How to screen record on a Mac and put a spotlight on one window

Short answer: to screen record on a Mac you need no extra software at all. Press Shift-Command-5, pick Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion, and click Record; macOS handles the rest through its own Screenshot app. The problem is what ends up in the file. A recording of the whole screen contains the whole screen — your notes, your chat, every other window — sitting beside the one thing you were actually talking about. That second half is where PGari Glowee comes in. Its Spotlight dims everything except the window you are in, on any Mac display, and because the dimming is drawn on the screen it is captured in the recording and in a shared screen exactly as any window would be. Glowee records nothing itself.

What viewers see in a screen record on a Mac with Spotlight running: one window at full strength, the surrounding desktop dimmed

One warning about the word first. Apple uses the name Spotlight for the search you open with Command-Space bar. This page is about something entirely different: a lighting effect for whoever is presenting.

How to screen record on a Mac, Apple's way

The steps below are Apple's own, for the Screenshot app.

Press Shift-Command-5. An onscreen toolbar appears across the bottom of the screen.
Choose what to capture. Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion — Apple notes you can "adjust the selected portion by dragging its borders with your mouse or trackpad". Record Selected Window is a third option, available from macOS Tahoe 26 onwards.
Open Options before you start. Pick a microphone to capture your voice alongside the screen. Show Mouse Clicks puts a black ring around the pointer at every click. There is also a timer and a Save to location — by default, recordings land on the desktop.
Click Record.
Stop the recording from the menu bar, or with the keys Command-Control-Esc.

Saved automatically, the file is named "Screen Recording [date] at [time].mov". Apple's Mac User Guide confirms the general rule: screen recordings are .mov files whose names begin with "Screen Recording" and carry the date and time.

QuickTime Player is the other route: File > New Screen Recording, or Control-Command-N. Apple's QuickTime guide is explicit that this "open[s] Screenshot and display[s] the tools" — the same toolbar, reached from a different app.

Two limits worth knowing before you plan a long take. Apple states that some apps, the Apple TV app among them, may not let you record their windows. And capturing the Mac's own system audio is listed as an option in macOS 27 Golden Gate or later, through Include System Audio.

Put a spotlight on the window you are explaining

A tutorial, a recorded lesson or a handover video is nearly always about one window: the spreadsheet, the editor, the browser tab, the dashboard. Everything else on the desktop is simply in the frame.

Spotlight's whole job is to dim everything except the window you are in.

Switch it on at the sun in the menu bar, or by pressing ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S wherever you are. The same chord switches it off, so you can change your mind halfway through a take without going near the menu.
Pick the strength: Off, Soft or Strong, according to how busy the screen is. It comes back at the level you used last time.
Click another window and the light follows. Moving between the slide deck and the browser needs no re-aiming.
Pin the window with Pinned so that a stray click does not drag the light away mid-recording.
It runs on any Mac display, XDR or not, built in or external. A MacBook Air is entirely fine here.

Spotlight is an on-screen layer, which is why screenshots and screen recordings pick it up the way they pick up any window. Nothing has to be masked afterwards in the edit.

Record the screen or a region — not a single window

Spotlight acts on what surrounds your window, which means it can only appear in a capture that takes in those surroundings. Capture the entire screen, or draw a selected portion wide enough to take in the dimmed area around the window.

The brightness boost stays out of the file

Glowee's other feature, Extra Brightness, pushes an XDR display past the macOS slider. That one is deliberately left out of captures, so a recording made on a lifted screen looks perfectly normal to the people watching it. It is for your eyes and does nothing for your audience, and it also needs an XDR or other EDR display — a MacBook Pro 14″ or 16″ from 2021 onwards, for instance. The MacBook Pro brightness guide covers that side of the app. Spotlight is the half your viewers actually see.

Live: a meeting, a class or a projector

Everything above holds when the screen is shared rather than recorded. Keep your slides in an ordinary window instead of full screen, share the screen, and switch Spotlight on. The notes, the chat window and the desktop behind it all step back, so the room follows the slide rather than whatever just arrived in your inbox. Teaching over a video call with a crowded screen, it keeps the document or the whiteboard lit and pushes the rest away, and nobody has to ask which window you mean. Just as with recording, the effect lives in the area around the window — so share the screen, not a single window, or there will be nothing dimmed to see.

On a Mac with Apple silicon running macOS Sonoma 14 or later, Apple's own Presenter Overlay can additionally place you on top of the screen you are sharing during a video call. That is a macOS feature and has nothing to do with Glowee; the two are simply solving different halves of the same picture.

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

Several Mac tools for presenters use the word spotlight and mean different things by it. Below is what each one says about itself on its own site.

Tool	How its own site describes it
macOS Screenshot	Show Mouse Clicks shows a black circle around the pointer at each 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 your screen, draw on a whiteboard, highlight your cursor, and spotlight or zoom in on key areas"
Scribbble	"Draw over anything on your Mac screen"; its Spotlight dims "everything except a circle around your cursor"; magnify and zoom
Screen Studio	A screen recorder that "automatically zooms in on your cursor, increases the cursor size and smooths its movements"; records webcam, microphone and system audio
PGari Glowee	Dims everything except the window you are in; the light moves when you click another window

Glowee lifts out a window. It does not ring the pointer, draw on the screen, zoom or record. If your viewers need to follow a single button or one line of code, a pointer tool or an annotation tool is the right purchase. If instead they need to stay with one window while you work inside it, a window spotlight is the one to buy. Plenty of people making tutorials end up with one of each. The window side of the question is covered further in highlighting the active window and dimming the inactive ones.

Questions people ask

What is the keyboard shortcut for screen recording on a Mac?

Shift-Command-5 brings up the Screenshot tools, where you choose what to capture and press Record. Command-Control-Esc stops it. From QuickTime Player, Control-Command-N starts a new screen recording and opens the same tools.

Can my voice go into the same recording?

Yes. Click Options in the Screenshot toolbar and select a microphone before you start recording.

Will the dimming show up in the recording, or on a shared screen?

Yes. Being an on-screen layer, Spotlight is captured by screenshots and screen recordings just as a window would be. The plain brightness boost is the exception, and stays out of captures.

So what does Spotlight do on a Mac?

Two unrelated things carry the name. Apple's Spotlight is the search field that Command-Space bar brings up. Glowee's Spotlight is a dimming effect, in which everything but your current window steps back.

And how do I get rid of the spotlight effect?

Press ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S, or pick Off under Spotlight on Glowee's menu. Quitting the app returns the display to normal as well.

Does any of this require a MacBook Pro?

No. Spotlight is plain dimming and runs anywhere. Only Extra Brightness insists on an XDR or other EDR display.

Where do my recordings end up?

On the desktop, unless you choose a different Save to location in Options. Screen recordings are saved as .mov files whose names begin with "Screen Recording" and include the date and time.

Can I try Glowee before buying it?

Seven days with nothing locked, no account and no card required. After that comes a one-off purchase — one Mac, or three Macs on one key — and 30 days in which to ask for a refund.

Try it on your next recording

PGari Glowee is one menu bar app of under 2 MB. It needs macOS 13 or later and runs as a single universal build on Apple silicon and on Intel. It puts nothing into the system — no kernel extension, no background helper.

Download the 7-day trial See how Glowee works