Embodiments may include systems, techniques, methods, apparatus and/or device to receive an input selecting one or more areas of a display of the computing device, leaving one or more other areas of the display unselected, and to apply a masking layer to mask either pixels of the one or more selected areas or pixels of the one or more unselected areas to cause the masked pixels to be dimmed, to reduce power consumption by the display. Embodiments may further include where the one or more of the selected areas include a focus area of interest, and to apply the masking layer to mask pixels of the one or more unselected areas to cause the masked pixels to be dimmed. Embodiments may be implemented via software without directly interacting with hardware. Other embodiments may be described or claimed.